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11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation

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(/previous) S h a k e s p e a r e a n d S o c i a l M e d i a (/about) E D I T E D B Y

(/archive) M a u r i z i o C a l b i a n d S t e p h e n O ' N e i l l

C O N T E N T S

Maurizio Calbi and Introduction (/783211/show) (pdf) (/783211/pdf) Stephen O'Neill

What Would Media Studies Do? Social Media Kylie Jarrett and Shakespeare as a Technosocial Process (/1794/show) Jeneen Naji (pdf) (/1794/pdf)

S H A K E S P E A R E A N / S O C I A L M E D I A I D E N T I T I E S

Juliet, I Prosume? or Shakespeare and the Social Kirk Hendershott- Network (/783190/show) (pdf) (/783190/pdf) Kraetzer

Peeking Behind the Digital Curtains: Shakespearean Performance Institutions, Social Media, and Access Geoffrey Way (/1756/show) (pdf) (/1756/pdf)

R E S P O N S I B L E N E T W O R K S

Researching YouTube Shakespeare: Literary Scholars and the Ethical Challenges of Social Media Valerie Fazel (/1755/show) (pdf) (/1755/pdf)

From Face to Facebook: Levinas's Radical Ethics and Lisa S. Starks-Estes "Shakespeare Friends" (/1802/show) (pdf) (/1802/pdf)

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M O D E S A N D M O D E L S O F ( I N ) A T T E N T I O N

The Economics of (In)Attention in YouTube Christy Desmet Shakespeare (/783210/show) (pdf) (/783210/pdf)

Jennifer Roberts- Staging Shakespeare in Social Games: Towards a Theory Smith, Shawn of Theatrical Game Design (/1779/show) (pdf) DeSouza-Coelho, and (/1779/pdf) Toby Malone

"Oh, teach me how I should forget to think": The Pedagogical Problems of Pleasure and Rigor in Social Kyle DiRoberto Media and Shakespeare (/783098/show) (pdf) (/783098/pdf)

A P P R O P R I A T I O N I N P E R F O R M A N C E

Hamlet Redux: Two Korean Productions that Re-stage Shakespeare's Play between Tradition and Today Jan Creutzenberg (/783209/show) (pdf) (/783209/pdf)

C O N T R I B U T O R S

Contributors (/783183/show) (pdf) (/783183/pdf) © Borrowers and Lenders 2005-2019

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What Would Media Studies Do? Social Media Shakespeare as

(/current) a Technosocial Process

KYLIE JARRETT AND JENEEN NAJI, NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF IRELAND MAYNOOTH (/previous)

(/archive)

ABSTRACT

This essay explores the topic of social media Shakespeare from the perspective of Media Studies, identifying directions for future research shaped by emerging approaches in this field. Drawing on a range of posthuman, political economy, and cultural studies strands, it conceptualizes social media Shakespearean texts as assemblages of interactions between technologies, human creative subjects, and wider socioeconomic contexts. It proposes exploring memes, videos, tweets, or blog posts as instances of technosocial communication that foreground the interplay of text, algorithms, and users. It argues for moving beyond exploration of signification to understanding the unfixed, processual qualities of these texts, including exploring them through the affective experiences of production and consumption. It further advocates for extending concepts of remediation or adaptation to encompass the cyclical, embodied, and dynamic processes of digital media. This, it argues, is what Media Studies would do to analyze social media's Shakespeares.

When approached by the editors of this special issue of Borrowers and Lenders on Social Media Shakespeare to contribute a discussion from the perspective of Media Studies, our initial challenge was to identify how our approach might differ from those commonly adopted in the field of Shakespearean scholarship. There are many connections between these disciplines, particularly in the emphasis on exploring the meanings made by mediated texts and how these may represent a challenge to, or perhaps a reproduction of, authorized social and cultural structures. This intersection is, of course, not newly established. Shakespeare studies has an expanding history of exploring global electronic and broadcast media's interpretations of Shakespeare, often approaching these texts as one would any literary text, albeit with attention to the processes of adaptation and translation (Cimitile and Rowe 2011). In social media, however, the overt and broad distribution of the capacity for production generates a multiplication of Shakespeares and an emphasis on the signifying practices of audiences that has long been the domain of the inter-related disciplines of www.borrowers.uga.edu/1794/show 1/14 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Media and Cultural Studies. The apparent novelty of these technologies also brings into relief the importance of any medium's specificity and how this may shape the meaning-making possibilities of social media's Shakespeares. Drawing on this rich heritage in both fields, we thus begin this essay with the assumption that it is not enough to focus on the representational qualities or significance of user-generated digital objects: it is not enough to analyze media as text.

In his study of girls' remediation of Ophelia on YouTube, Stephen O'Neill observes that "each component of the YouTube-Shakespeare-Ophelia triptych is already situated within and inscribed by mass media and consumer culture" and so "becomes another example of the ways in which our (online) lives bear traces of mass media and the marks of the corporate" (O'Neill 2014a). While his analysis focuses on exploring how the textual qualities of amateur Opheliana reflect and speak to dominant modes of gendered identity-making, O'Neill's point that these texts must be viewed in terms of their location in existing ideological, technical, and economic systems is important. Such critiques, however, must be extended and made more complex in order to understand the social and technological architectures used to create, distribute, and consume social media's Shakespearean texts.

In this essay, we reconceptualize these Shakespeares as assemblages of the interactions between technologies, human creative subjects, and the wider socioeconomic context. These elements intertwine in a complex process of creation and re-creation. We explore what can be gained by approaching these processes not solely at the level of signification but also through greater consideration of the interactions between these actors, many of which are not human. We will initially outline the technosocial aspects of digitally mediated communication, and how consideration of the range of actors involved in digital media production generates a trilogical process of development constituted by interactions between user, hardware, and software. We explore the implications of this paradigm, arguing for understanding social media's Shakespearean texts in relation to the apparatus through which they are articulated, rather than as a set of static textual objects. This in turn raises the importance of the relationship of human actors and the conceptual and affective frameworks they bring to their interactions with digital technologies. The answer to the question of what Media Studies would do is, thus, not simple, and it promises difficult methodological reconfiguration. But it is to conceptualize media texts in ways that capture more of the complexity of digital mediation than is allowed by exploring meanings instantiated in texts alone.

SOCIOTECHNICAL INFRASTRUCTURES As media and media analysis have moved from an emphasis on print and electronic forms to the digital, there has been a renewed focus on the material structures of every medium and their technological infrastructures. The technical qualities of earlier, well-established technologies of television, radio, and print media had been naturalized and the insights of theorists such as McLuhan (1964), Carey (1989), and Innis (1951) that the form of these technologies communicated and effected social change as much as the content they represented had dropped from view. In the "newness" of digital media, though, the underlying technology became visible again, and Media Studies has increasingly focused on the ways in which technological infrastructure shapes and reshapes what it is possible to think and do when we are engaged with any particular medium. This is particularly important for understanding online social media. Lawrence Lessig (2006) argues that underlying code or technical infrastructure in digital environments can act as "law," determining not only what is possible to do with a technology, but also what can be conceptualized as being possible. He uses the analogy of code as a locked door that one cannot open, but also not see past www.borrowers.uga.edu/1794/show 2/14 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation to know whether what lies beyond is valuable. Like the structural constraints of verse forms such as Shakespeare's iambic pentameter, the uploading limits of YouTube, the 140 characters of Twitter, or the chronological flow of Tumblr feeds are all examples of what is beyond the control of users and shapes but profoundly influence the nature of the "digital objects" (Mhurthy 2013) that they are able to produce. Shaped by such insights, research into digital media has increasingly focused on the affordances of technologies — identifying the practices they enable and/or constrain — in order to grasp the shaping of user agency (Hutchby 2001). The Shakespeares that are produced in social media are thus profoundly influenced by the specificity of each medium's affordances, and attention to this specificity, as cautiously advocated by O'Neill (2014b, 6-7), is an important starting point.

The emphasis placed on affordances here should not, however, be read as a form of technological determinism (Williams 1974; Manovich 2013, 96). The technological infrastructures of social media technologies do not manifest autonomously but are products of social actors, whether these are the individual developers who design the systems or the corporations who hire them. Each of these actors has particular ideological frameworks or agendas that are manifested in the code or technological architecture that users encounter at the level of the interface. These agendas are materialized in the affordances their products extend to users and subsequently into the texts and meanings these users are able to produce. To analyze social media through their affordances is therefore partly to identify the traces of the actors who develop technologies and their ideologies in the outputs and meaning-making frameworks of their users.

But there are other actors influencing the structures of social media. While not under-stating the influence of code, the affordances of any digital media site are also shaped by the social uses of that technology. As Lucas Graves argues (2007), how a particular technology is normatively used is influenced by user practices in alliance with, or contravention of, technological affordances. He discusses how blogging practices are as much determined by the cultural meanings and social desires established through their use as by the technological affordances of blogging sites. There is, structurally, no reason for news blogs to call upon reader input, to be used to fix information that may otherwise disappear from the information sphere and to pull together and juxtapose multiple sources. These common structures of news blogging are available within the technological infrastructure, but it is social norms that establish and fix these features as definitive of the genre. Affordances, Graves suggests, are thus sociotechnical, emerging from the interaction of technological objects that materialize certain agendas, and the quotidian practices of users.

The adaptation of Shakespeare through Twitter's affordances — for instance, in the summaries of the plays by blogger Amy Helmes (2012) — illustrates these dynamics. These tweets are the products of a creative opportunity opened up by the technological platform and are inextricably shaped by the character limits that are a fundamental property of the site's infrastructure. Consequently, these tweets do not favor a rich dialogic interaction that generates a profound critical interrogation of the plays. This is because, as Murthy describes, Twitter is "event-driven" and "designed to provoke and call forth regular updates from their users" (2013, 25). However, this is as much an effect of common ways of navigating and engaging with the technology as it is of the limitations of the archive, recall, and comment functions of the technical system. It is technically possible to develop a rich and lengthy discussion about interpretations of Shakespeare using a range of tweets, breaking the discourse into 140-character sequences, uploaded in succession, and to provoke interrogation of the text's meaning, such as in the performance of Romeo and Juliet described by Calbi (2013, 137-62). It is, however, simply "not done." Such interventions may function and be experienced as extraordinary art events rather than the richly meaningful, yet normatively structured and encoded, practices of interpretation and citation that constitute the www.borrowers.uga.edu/1794/show 3/14 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation everyday uses of the platform and that make up the bulk of the digital object that is Twitter's Shakespeare. It is more common to see merely spectral Shakespearean traces (Calbi 2013) in someone's username, in the incorporation of a quote, in a promotional tweet, or in any other context where the Bard's cultural valence is drawn upon.

It is important, however, not to over-estimate the agency of users in defining the technosocial affordances of any technology. The capacity of users to influence technological development meaningfully remains much less than that of the companies that produce platforms. True participatory design is rare indeed, and the various controversies of Facebook re-designs, where only rarely have consumer's interests and protests had a real impact on the system's structures, illustrate the unequal power relations between media producers and users (for instance, Bates 2008; Ionescu 2009). This gives the lie to the notion that the difference between consumers and producers has become less consequential in participatory culture, as implied by theorists such as Jenkins (2006). The agency to restructure the complex algorithms and end-user license agreements that encode activity does not belong directly to the average user. That said, productive agency is extended to users in digital media with greater extensity and intensity than in precursor forms, intersecting with the structuring principles of various other actors who together determine the contours of digital media texts.

TRILOGICAL TECHNOSOCIAL COMMUNICATION That the question of agency in relation to affordances is so complex is crucial to emphasize. It serves to indicate the range of actors — technological, human, and institutional — that is implicated in digital media production. We argue here, however, that it is the interactions between these actors that need to be interrogated in order to bring social media's Shakespeares into view. Social media Shakespeare can be considered a cybertext, defined by Espen Aarseth (1997) as a text that is created and experienced through a computer. This is the central point of Jenny Weight's article "I, Apparatus, You: A Technosocial Introduction to Creative Practice" (2006). Weight (2006) suggests that the specificity of interactive digital media and its creative uses lies in a trilogical relationship between the user, the machine that they manipulate, and the software or code through which expressions are processed. Media Studies has long recognized the active role played by audiences and their gendered, classed, raced, or otherwise socially embedded decoding practices in the creation of meaning. It is in the relationship between the encoding of meaning by producers and the decoding practices of audience members that meaning emerges. However, rather than exhibiting this two-level structure of meaning-making, Kerr et al. (2006, 68) argue that digital media instead exhibit a three-level structure. In between the traditional two-levels of encoding and decoding is the physical manifestation of the user's individual choices that are inextricably tied to the technological systems with which they interact.

N. Katherine Hayles's (2004) position is particularly relevant for understanding this point. She suggests that due to the effectiveness of the computer as a simulation machine, it is seductive to think of text on the screen as similar to text on the page. She argues that this is misleading, however, because the creation of digital text is in fact a process, an event that is only ever emerging from the interactions between different factors such as software, hardware, and wetware (the human actor) (Hayles 2006, 181). In print media, although there is a process to arrive at the text, once the end result is achieved the texts do not change at the level of material structure and maintain a certain consistency over time and space (Hayles 2006, 183). Like the live performance of a Shakespearean play (Worthen 2006), on the other hand a digital text is a particular articulation, the end result of specific interactions with specific programs at that specific moment. As with the www.borrowers.uga.edu/1794/show 4/14 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Greek philosopher Heraclitus' belief that you cannot step in the same river twice, neither can the same digital text be repeated, for each time a process is carried out there are inevitable variations (Hayles 2006, 186). For instance, perhaps the platform or software is drawing on a different personalization algorithm from the previous articulation; perhaps the machine lags; perhaps the affective response to the screen by the user is less intense. It is only in the particularities of these interactions that a digital text can take form. Each textual event is, effectively, the interaction of technosocial actors, confirming the importance of considering all three partners in the communication process in any analysis. This leads to consideration of two important qualities of the assemblages that are social media texts: the text's relationship to the apparatus and the user's interaction with that text/apparatus.

TEXT AS APPARATUS Weight's argument is that interactive digital texts "cannot be understood separately from the apparatus that displays and performs them" (2006, 413). They become inextricable, with each informing the other: they become, as Weight terms them, text-as-apparatus. Lev Manovich argues that this happens because in "cultural communication, a code is rarely simply a neutral transport mechanism; usually it affects the messages transmitted with its help" (2001, 64). Weight (2006, 431) reminds us of three commonly identified features of text as apparatus: the interface, the database, and the algorithm. The interface is the apparatus screen such as the computer monitor or device touch screen, or the particular view encountered by the user on that screen. Odin (2007) reminds us that while in the print medium content is the same as the interface, the digital medium needs an interface to make the content accessible to the user otherwise they would be presented merely with screens of code. The second common feature of the text-as-apparatus that Weight (2006, 431) outlines is the database: "a collection of items that constitutes the content of the work and exists in binary code on the computer" (Odin, 2007). In interactive digital media, the database contains the foundational elements of the narratives assembled at the interface. The third feature is the algorithm, a series of instructions that determine the qualities of the interaction, including that which manifests at the level of the interface. Weight describes algorithms as interactivity; in other words, the algorithm dictates the extent to which the user is given freedom within the environment. Algorithms thus link the user to the database and so allow them to form new relationships.

Although the apparatus is being directed by the human, there is also the possibility of the apparatus itself contributing unanticipated elements to the process and for this interaction to define, at least momentarily, the text/apparatus. For instance, Aimée Morrison (2014) describes how unheralded changes to the affordances of Facebook's status update field "coax" different kinds of self- disclosure. She notes the shift from the elicitation of factual information associated with the original form of " is . . ." (e.g., Mary Jones is updating her status) to the openness allowed by the more recent disaggregation of user name, verb, and update field. Morrison suggests that the form of the autobiographies we assemble, and we would add the desire to constantly assemble and re-assemble these stories, emerge from the varying interactions of user and plastic, dynamic machines. The apparatus here is involved in the production of digital texts as much as other, more sentient, actors.

In a context where the text cannot be wholly distinguished from the hardware and software through which it is generated, and where those apparatuses have certain agency, we find a new communicative and, indeed, expressive process that is quite different from previous traditional analogue texts. To pull a particular arrangement of images, texts, or sound from the underlying database of the system is to experience and generate a unique text that remains malleable by virtue www.borrowers.uga.edu/1794/show 5/14 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation of its continued relation to the apparatus. The creation of memes through a meme-creating platform such as memegenerator is a useful example. The user may select a Shakespearean image from those available within the networked databases of the internet, add content by using the provided meme-generating technological platform, and then distribute it through various embedded mechanisms such as Facebook links, or use the drop-down menus of their computer to cut and paste this image. To experience this meme in your Facebook feed is also to engage with the interface of another database, determined by the algorithms that calculate your personal preferences and determine what is visible in your newsfeed. The meme as a text therefore remains embedded in, connected to, and shaped by the apparatus in varying ways across its life cycle, as is made overt in the overlaying of branding.

This maintenance of the link with production technology makes for particularly unfixed texts w,ith often-indeterminate distribution patterns. Consequently, as Lister et al. maintain, digital media offer new textual experiences, including "new kinds of genre, textual form, entertainment, pleasure and patterns of media consumptions (computer games, hypertexts, special effects cinema)" (Lister et al. 2003, 12). Social media Shakespeare, when understood as embedded in the processes of the apparatus, is indeed a new textual experience, but also a new object of analysis. As merely a manifestation of a particular, and dynamic, algorithmic logic, each iteration is more than a single aesthetic object, or collection of objects, that can be explored thoroughly using existing strategies of textual analysis. As Kerr et al. suggest, "new media cannot be understood simply by adopting existing approaches and concepts . . . rather these concepts need to be carefully adapted to reflect the specificities of new media text, the experiences they engender and their varied concepts of use" (2006, 78). This fluid, multilayered approach means, for example, that Shakespearean tweets must be considered in conjunction with the current shape and form of Twitter itself. The examination of the materiality of texts and its implication for the production of meaning is nothing new. However, the expanded and mutable interconnected potentialities of meaning now apparent in the "text-as- apparatus" evoke a confusing, dynamic, and intriguing network of meaning-making and actors in social media's Shakespeare.

USER INTERACTIONS It is not, however, only the lack of fixity associated with the particular qualities of digital, interactive media that limits textual analysis as an analytical tool. It is also because the meaning of any digital text cannot be found in qualities that inhere in the actors involved in its production, but instead develops in the interactions between them. Weight describes the trilogical relationship between users, machines, and software as meaningful and rewarding for its human interpreters, at the same time referring to a creative agent that is not solely human. This actor emerges during the particular interactions that occur between technological interface and human operator. She states: "The creating technosocial subject collaborates with the apparatus to create new media or communication. The interpreting technosocial subject interprets media or communication performed and disseminated via (but not initiated by) the apparatus" (Weight 2006, 415). In the same way that the text cannot be clearly differentiated from the apparatus, the actor involved in producing digital texts, who emerges as an actor from that activity, is not distinct from the enabling and constraining technologies with which they are interacting. Together they constitute the technosocial subject involved in production.

To understand social media Shakespeare through such a trilogic, processual framework, it is vital then to place the human actor in relation to their inputs and manipulations of the technological infrastructure. These actions must be interrogated not for their mechanical properties — which www.borrowers.uga.edu/1794/show 6/14 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation button is pushed when — but for the ways in which they make meaning in and of themselves. In their complication of media effects, Stuart Hall (1980) and others in the so-called Birmingham School have re-centered the study of media on the active meaning-making practices of audiences rather than assuming that the intention of producers and their ideological ideals could be simply read from the text or from the production practices themselves. This focus on the "active" rather than passive audience is at the core of the concept of participatory culture (Jenkins 2006) associated with social media. This paradigm emphasizes the need to focus on the socially embedded conceptual frameworks individuals bring to their engagement with media, but also how the dialogue between audiences and primary texts becomes the text as an experiential process of meaning-making. In social media, that engagement includes the active production of original content rather than merely post hoc interpretations.

It is this emphasis on the dynamic emergence of meanings through the interactions of various human and non-human actors that extends the frameworks already applied by Shakespearean scholars in understanding the reception of the texts. When conceived as a cybernetic process — a process of feedback between user and machine both at moments of production and consumption — interactive media move attention away from understanding this process primarily in terms of its representational output. The inputs — the desires, motivations, concepts, pleasures, and, importantly, the embodied performance of that user — are worth exploring if we are to understand fully what it means to interact with Shakespeare through social media. As Aarseth says, the trilogic nature of meaning-making "renders traditional semiotic models and terminology, which were developed for objects that are mostly static, useless in their present unmodified form" (1997, 26). This is not only because the texts themselves become increasingly unbounded, fragmented, and polyvocal, so that authorship and intention become unclear, but also because digital media insert the embodied subjectivity of the user into the circuit of meaning-making, often in quite material ways.

The history of computer games studies is illuminating here, as it maps a shift from attempts to focus on games as narratives to an emphasis on ludology — on understanding games as play. It is argued that a computer game cannot be understood without understanding the experience of its game-play. As Sundén (2010) documents in her study of the massive multiplayer online game, World of Warcraft (WoW), the "wetware" on the other side of the computer keyboard is as much a part of the gaming, the meaning, and the system that is WoW as is the code, the interface, and the narrative trajectory of the game. She elaborates: Games are played, not merely read or watched. They perform a simultaneous splitting of the subject, as well as perhaps a re-joining of their parts. As a player, you are an embodied subject on the outskirts of the game. At the same time, in most games you perform in and through a different body, a screen-based representation which becomes your vehicle for game play. Game play consists of consecutive actions and reactions, of endless cybernetic feedback loops in which you and the game are entwined and altered. You are not only playing the game: the game is also, most concretely, playing you. (Sundén 2010, 47) The player is more than an effect or function of the game-design but an embodied and particular subject for whom the meaning of play is quite specific. To understand these texts, then, increasingly involves "close play," the exploration of the affective, desiring body involved in gaming, as well as attention to the multiplicities of that subject as s/he moves through various modes of engagement and relations to the text/apparatus.

www.borrowers.uga.edu/1794/show 7/14 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Social media Shakespeare can, and perhaps must, be interpreted in a similar way, as more akin to a live performance than to a static textual inscription (Worthen 2006). If we are to know what it is to transform a Shakespeare sonnet into the 140 characters of a tweet, to video-record Hamlet's soliloquy in your bedroom and distribute that to friends and strangers alike, to receive the affirmations of likes and shares of your meme, or to engage with the "haters" and "trolls" who scorn lovingly crafted interpretations, we need to know what it is to produce these texts. We need to know the physical and mental processes involved, and also how it feels to generate such texts through each particular technology. For instance, a friend reading a tweet such as "'How poor are they that have not patience? What wound did ever heal but in degrees? — William Shakespeare" by @ToumaMusic" in the context of a personal newsfeed is wholly different to our experience encountering it by searching under the #Shakespeare hashtag. For us, this is a simple quotation amongst many, without any significant affective resonance. It slips easily into the background noise of Twitter's Shakespearean texts. However, for a friend this quote may speak eloquently to the particularities of @ToumaMusic's life, rendering this textual encounter a profoundly moving experience. For @ToumaMusic himself, the writing of this tweet may be a more or less emotionally expressive act, done in more or less engaging circumstances — on a phone with a frustratingly intermittent 3G signal while waiting for a coffee, at a desktop during work to kill time, or on a tablet while drinking wine on the sofa after a difficult and emotional day. The thirty-six retweets and thirty-eight favorites may similarly inflect this text with significance, as these are interpreted as signs of emotional support, or perhaps because of the ego boost that comes from such online recognition. That the author of this tweet is a singer-songwriter signed to a commercial label with 86,000 Twitter followers adds further layers to the embodied experience of all receiving and producing this tweet, and this must also be negotiated in understanding this instance of social media Shakespeare. If nothing else, the desiring body of the fan must be taken into account. To interpret this text, then, requires a close reading of the various embodied, institutional, symbolic, and technological dimensions through which its production and consumption are articulated. As this example indicates, mapping the social and affective intensities that mark moments of production and consumption adds a great deal of complexity, both theoretical and methodological, to the study of Shakespeare. It requires not only finding the meaning of the texts in the experiences of the "collective subject" produced by the "horde of individuals on a single site," or across platforms, as advocated by Hendershott-Kraetzer (in this issue), but also knowing the multiple, collected, and fragmented subjectivities and practices of each of those individuals at different determinate moments of the production and consumption processes.

However, it is important to temper any exploration of the desiring, active user of social media with the recognition that these interactions happen in commercial contexts. Increasingly, we spend our time on-line in proprietary walled gardens (Anderson and Wolff 2010), engaged in banal and quotidian interactions with pre-defined, pre-scripted options for engagement coded into software. Social media are, as O'Neill (2011, 73) reminds us, largely commercial entertainment platforms intended to generate profit rather than tools designed to facilitate complex, unfettered, creative expression. This is despite the potential, and promise, of digital media to offer an almost unlimited agency. For instance, interaction is constrained by text boxes that shape and narrow our capacity for interaction with the apparatus, and by modes that primarily feed the corporate machinery that sells the qualities of that interaction to marketing and advertising companies (see Fuchs 2008, 2009, and 2014; and Scholz 2013). Our use as producers and consumers is overlaid by economic and legal systems such as copyright that also generate powerful constraints. For instance, at the time of writing, the user-generated YouTube mashup "Death Scenes from Shakespeare" (Roberts 2008) is underlined by an orange text box, stating: "This video previously contained a copyrighted audio track. Due to a claim by a copyright holder, the audio track has been muted." The video still plays, www.borrowers.uga.edu/1794/show 8/14 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation but with no sound, fundamentally transforming this user's self-expression and the experience for the text's audience. The interfaces through which we interact are technosocial actors, so commercial agendas such as this animate their contribution to each particular digital media interaction. The text/apparatus that social media Shakespeare's users interact with is also a machine for making money and this is also an important aspect of the experience of use that constitutes the technosocial subject.

BEYOND REMEDIATION Our argument thus far has taken us away from understanding the medium-specificity of social media Shakespeare primarily through representational output and shaping by purely technical affordances. It has also taken us away from the concept of remediation that has become an important means for understanding Shakespeare's presence across electronic and digital media platforms (e.g., O'Neill 2011 and 2014b; Burt 2002; and Donaldson 2006). As conceptualized by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin (2000), remediation is the process by which emerging media forms incorporate prior forms, partly because it is only through comparison to earlier media that we are able to understand any new medium (Fagerjord 2003, 1). Bolter and Grusin also suggest that new forms in turn re-shape pre-existing forms (as evidenced, for example, in the increasing incorporation of multimedia elements in live theatrical productions). They argue that such mutual incorporation is a necessary part of the evolution of media, as shown in the remediation of painting by photography; stage production and photography by film; and film, vaudeville, and radio by television. As Larissa Hjorth (2011) reminds us, Bolter and Grusin's remediation theory in fact builds on McLuhan's formative suggestion that the content of new media is that of the previous technology; he suggests that all media are translations and that in the electric age, we are continuously translating ourselves into more forms of information. Rather than leaving the past behind, as we may initially perceive, we in fact see echoes of the past in new technologies and the uses we make of them (Hjorth 2011, 442; Booth 2012). Thus, in each new media form it has been possible to trace the changes and persistence of particular formal properties in order to interrogate the significance of new textual formations and to assay how each new iteration reproduces, complicates, challenges, or even queers a previous meaning-making system.

We find some evidence of the same process occurring in relation to social media Shakespeare, but while there are elements, such as text, buttons, pages, and screens, that can easily be recognized as deriving from older forms of media, there is also evidence of something entirely new at play. The interactive communication loop we have described here (as opposed to the linear transmission afforded by traditional media) is not something that can be identified as a remediated form of what has gone before. As Chun states, new media is not "digitized forms of other media (photography, video, text) but rather an interactive medium or form of distribution as independent as the information it relayed" (2006, 1). Merely viewing social media Shakespeares as remediated forms of what has gone before does not account for the cyclical, dynamic, embodied, and interactive communicative process that digital environments invoke.

Social media, therefore, are not only concerned with the adaptation or translation of Shakespeare by the socio-technological parameters of the new medium, or about how the new and the old intersect to create particular meaning-making frameworks. They also consider how the diffusion of the agency to generate these adaptations is experienced and articulated as a technologically and biologically embodied logic within that intersection. While a valuable framework, Bolter and Grusin's argument fails to shine enough light on these processes. They remain overly influenced by the traditional communicative model of two-level texts, ignoring the dynamic potentialities of the www.borrowers.uga.edu/1794/show 9/14 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation digital text/apparatus and its relationship to and interactions with the embodied subject of the producer and the consumer. This oversight needs to be acknowledged and addressed within Shakespeare studies as scholars approach the vast array of social media's Shakespearean forms. To draw on game studies again, Giddings (2007) posits that although in both academic and popular criticism, it is often argued that electronic and digital screens capture the surfaces of objects and phenomena, in fact "their essence, their reality, their intangible and invisible operation (economic, social, political) are jettisoned" (Giddings 2007, 422; see also Fagerjord 2003, 28). This indicates that while on the surface some online Shakespearean content — with its simulations of page turning and screens that look like picture frames and book pages — may look like older forms of media, beneath these surface similarities lies a very different beast.

WHAT MEDIA STUDIES WOULD DO To understand the medium-specificity of social media Shakespeare, but break from the concept of remediation and the interpretation of digital texts as objects, as we have proposed here, generates significant methodological and conceptual challenges. It is no longer about mapping the meanings and desires of a unified and complete subject that are then expressed in an object. It also cannot claim a singular static object as its focus of study. In the dynamic cybernetic exchanges of digital media, what is created is an ever-shifting human-machine assemblage that cannot be reified and examined as a discrete object. To approach social media Shakespeare as a trilogical technosocial communication process is about mapping shifting affective resonances and meaning-making registers as subjects move in and out of immersion, engagement, distance, and abstraction in the various processes involved in producing and consuming digital texts.

To take one example, the intensity of engagement with a Shakespearean sonnet that manifests itself in speaking to the camera in the production of a vlog must be understood in concert with the level of engagement experienced in the manipulation of the various technologies involved in its production and distribution. For example, onefoolshead's Shakespeare vlog (2013) is recorded in the very personal space of the user's bedroom; on the wall behind her, we see posters from Harry Potter films. She sits on her bed in her school uniform and she introduces us to her cello named Henry VII because, as she says, "it's Shakespeare." Vlogger onefoolshead is not only introducing us to Shakespeare in a different format, she is introducing us to her Shakespeare, as it is shaped and transmitted from her world using the tools and technologies available to her and selected by her. As Sloane tells us, in the past "reading was a matter of responding to a locked visual field, a habit of responding silently within one's own skull and body, to a prefigured text . . . traditional engagement with text is more private than public" (2000, 98). Now, however, "the materials of interactive fiction have made reading become a public and responsive act of visibly inscribing self on text" (Sloane 2000, 98-99). Vlogger onefoolshead is very visibly inscribing herself on the Shakespearean text by not only recording her vlog in her bedroom but by the recording and editing she conducts using her specific technologies and also the selection of YouTube as her chosen vehicle for communication and expression. To approach Shakespeare from a Media Studies perspective is, then, to explore these public inscriptions of self into technology and technology into self. This brings into play Hayles's (2012, 102) concept of technogenesis, which maintains that humans and technics have evolved together.

However, it is also more than this. It is also about interrogating those experiences where the technosocial apparatus inserts its own agency, generating another, perhaps less desirable, suite of experiences, such as constrained agency, frustrating lag-times, and exploitative data gathering. Not only does the wetware of human subjectivity offer a dynamic range of potentialities for exploration, www.borrowers.uga.edu/1794/show 10/14 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation but so too does the hardware, or the digital text/apparatus. It is about viewing each performance of Shakespeare on social media as a particular negotiation between the biological, psychological, affective, social, economic, and technological affordances of a range of highly dynamic actors. Using a variety of textual and ethnographic methods to identify the specific qualities and outcomes of these negotiations is thus the means by which to understand social media's Shakespeares.

What Media Studies would do, then, is undeniably messy, particularly because its methods decenter the researcher's ability to define the signification of these texts. Stuart Hall and the Birmingham School would suggest, however, that generating an adequate understanding of popular mass mediated texts has always been messy. This is the heritage of playing to audiences whose varying interactions as individuals, and en masse, co-produce the text, a particular quality of live theatrical production that should be no stranger to Shakespearean scholars. This effect is amplified by global, mass distribution as well as by interactive technologies that intensify the ability of those audience members to produce and re-produce texts, in which each reproduction is a unique event rendered by the dynamism of the digital apparatus. Human expression, such as that which can be found in examples of social media Shakespeare online, has come a great distance from the realm of traditional media, and researchers need to make that journey, too.

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Cimitile, Anna Maria, and Katherine Rowe. 2011. "Introduction: Shakespeare: Overlapping Mediascapes in the Mind." Anglistica 15.2: i-iii. Available online at: http://sebinaol.unior.it/sebina/repository/catalogazione/documenti/2011%2015.2%20Cimitile- Rowe%20Anglistica.pdf (http://sebinaol.unior.it/sebina/repository/catalogazione/documenti/2011%2015.2%20Cimitile- Rowe%20Anglistica.pdf) [accessed 24 June 2014]. Donaldson, Peter. 2006. "Hamlet Among the Pixelvisionaries: Video Art, Authenticity, and 'Wisdom' in Almereyda's Hamlet." In A Concise Companion to Shakespeare on Screen. Edited by Diana E. Henderson. Oxford: Blackwell. 216-37. Fagerjord, Anders. 2003. "Rhetorical Convergence: Earlier Media Influence on Web Media Form." Available online at: http://fagerjord.no/rhetoricalconvergence (http://fagerjord.no/rhetoricalconvergence) [accessed 28 June 2010]. Fuchs, Christian. 2014. Social Media: A Critical Introduction. London: Sage. Fuchs, Christian. 2009. 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"The Time of Digital Poetry: From Object to Event." In New Media Poetics: Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories. Edited by Adelaide Morris and Thomas Swiss. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. 181-209. Hayles, N. Katherine. 2004. "Print is Flat, Code is Deep: The Importance of Media-Specific Analysis." Poetics Today 25.1: 67-90. Helmes, Amy. 2012. "To Tweet or Not to Tweet: Shakespeare Plays Retold, Twitter-Style." Huffington Post. The Blog. 17 December. Available online at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/amy-helmes/to- tweet-or-not-to-tweet-_b_2302107.html (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/amy-helmes/to-tweet-or- not-to-tweet-_b_2302107.html) [accessed 6 February 2014]. Hendershott-Kraetzer, Kirk. 2016."Juliet, I Prosume? Or Shakespeare and the Social Network." Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 10.1 (Spring). Available online at: http://www.borrowers.uga.edu (http://www.borrowers.uga.edu) [accessed 30 April 2016]. www.borrowers.uga.edu/1794/show 12/14 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Hjorth, Larissa. 2011. "Domesticating New Media: A Discussion on Locating Mobile Media." In New Media and Technocultures Reader. Edited by Seth Giddings and Martin Lister. London and New York: Routledge. 437-48. Hutchby, Ian. 2001. "Technologies, Texts, and Affordances." Sociology 35: 441-56. Innis, Harold A. 1951. The Bias of Communication. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Ionescu, Daniel. 2009. "Facebook Redesign Revolt Grows to 1.7m." PCWorld. 23 March. Available online at: http://www.pcworld.com/article/161752/facebook_users_against_redesign.html (http://www.pcworld.com/article/161752/facebook_users_against_redesign.html) [accessed 23 June 2014]. Jenkins, Henry. 2006. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press. Kerr, Aphra, Julian Kücklich, and Patrick Brereton. 2006. "New Media — New Pleasures?" International Journal of Cultural Studies 9.1: 63-82. Lessig, Lawrence. 2006. Code Version 2.0. New York: Basic Books. Lister, Martin, Jon Dovey, Seth Giddings, Iain Grant, and Kieran Kelly. 2003. New Media: A Critical Introduction. New York and Oxon: Routledge. Manovich, Lev. 2013. Software Takes Command. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Manovich, Lev. 2001. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. McLuhan, Marshall. 1964. Understanding Media. New York: McGraw-Hill. memegenerator. 2014. Available online at: http://memegenerator.net/ (http://memegenerator.net/) [accessed 23 June 2014]. Murthy, Dhiraj. 2013. Twitter: Social Communication in the Twitter Age. Cambridge: Polity. Morrison, Aimée. 2014. "Facebook and Coaxed Affordances." In Identity Technologies: Constructing the Self Online. Edited by Anna Poletti and Julie Rak. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. 112-31. Odin, Jaishree. 2007. "The Database, the Interface, and the Hypertext: A Reading of Strickland's V." Electronic Book Review. 14 October. Available online at: http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/isomorphic (http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/isomorphic) [accessed 21 November 2008]. onefoolshead. 2013. "The Shakespeare Vlog!" YouTube. Available online at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6eQF9w-_C8&list=PL7_9EXLm0fk_N5VDnPcU- cUYyprzhtz1j (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6eQF9w- _C8&list=PL7_9EXLm0fk_N5VDnPcU-cUYyprzhtz1j) [accessed 25 June 2014]. O'Neill, Stephen. 2014a. "Ophelian Negotiations: Remediating the Girl on YouTube." Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 9.1 (Summer/Fall). Available online at: http://www.borrowers.uga.edu/1281/show" (http://www.borrowers.uga.edu/1281/show) [accessed 30 April 2016]. O'Neill. Stephen. 2014b. Shakespeare and YouTube: New Media Forms and the Bard. London: Bloomsbury Arden.

www.borrowers.uga.edu/1794/show 13/14 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation O'Neill, Stephen. 2011. "Uploading Hamlet: Agency, Convergence, and YouTube Shakespeare." Anglistica 15.2: 63-75. Available online at: http://sebinaol.unior.it/sebina/repository/catalogazione/documenti/2011%2015.2%20Cimitile- Rowe%20Anglistica.pdf (http://sebinaol.unior.it/sebina/repository/catalogazione/documenti/2011%2015.2%20Cimitile- Rowe%20Anglistica.pdf) [accessed 24 June 2014]. Roberts, Ian. 2008. Death Scenes from Shakespeare. YouTube. Available online at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXb82QLeQiI (https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=BXb82QLeQiI) [accessed 23 June 2014]. Scholz, Trebor, ed. 2013. Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and Factory. New York: Routledge. Sloane, Sarah. 2000. Digital Fictions: Storytelling in a Material World. Stamford, Conn.: Ablex Publishing Corporation. Sundén, Jenny. 2010. "A Sense of Play: Affect, Emotion", and Embodiment in World of Warcraft." In Working with Affect in Feminist Readings: Disturbing Differences. Edited by Marianne Liljestrom and Susanna Paasonen. Oxon: Routledge. 45-57. Weight, Jenny. 2006. "I, Apparatus, You: A Technosocial Introduction to Creative Practice." Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 12.4: 413-46. Williams, Raymond. 1974. Television: Technology and Cultural Form. London: Fontana. Worthen, W. B. 2006. "Texts, Tools and Technologies of Performance: A Quip, Modest, in Response to R. A. Foakes." Shakespeare 2.2: 208-19.

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Juliet, I Prosume? or Shakespeare and the Social Network

(/current) KIRK HENDERSHOTT-KRAETZER, OLIVET COLLEGE

(/archive) ABSTRACT

Though it may come as little surprise that Juliet is a popular character on Facebook, it may surprise how popular she is: in late 2013, there were at least 3,500 of her populating the social media platform. This essay inquires into what is being said about Juliet on Facebook. How is she being represented? Are there patterns to be found? If so, what might those patterns suggest about whether scholarly understandings of the character are shared in the broader culture? Like the sheer number of Facebook Juliets, the answers to these questions are surprising. Although some Juliets on Facebook may be phoned-in, disengaged, or just plain silly, even their silliness reveals individual account holders who are engaged in some way with Shakespeare and reveals how those account holders have come to understand him and his works. Through a complex intersection of negotiation, resistance, and prosumption, we see not just reconfigurations of the character Juliet, but a reconfiguration of Juliet as what Leisha Jones calls the "digital collective subject" (2011, 448), as well as a reconfiguration of Juliet's relationship with the world. This process happens not through the actions of an individual (like Shakespeare) but through the actions of thousands of individuals operating independently of each other; at the same time, many of these individuals are remaking themselves and others as Juliet. Facebook Juliet participates in Romeo and Juliet's already-long history of adaptation as well as in long-established debates over what constitutes the essential, authentic Shakespeare; she demonstrates new ways of thinking about the character Juliet, including ways in which individuals relate to authorities of various stripes and relate Juliet to themselves; she reveals the workings of a variety of aspects of our culture; and she models how to think about identity, identity construction, even reality itself in a social media world.

My bounty is as boundless as the sea, / My love as deep; the more I give to thee, / The more I have, for both are infinite. — Romeo and Juliet 2.2.134-35

Non so chi sono, non so cosa diventerò. — "Juliet"

In its role as a love story, Romeo and Juliet is foundational in Western culture, so easily eclipsing its own textual foundations in mythology and Western European and Classical literature that when I am giving public talks on the play, often before theatrical performances, many of the people I meet are surprised to learn that the text did not spring, Athena-like, from the head of its creator, whole and entire.1 Similarly, it is arguable that Juliet — as Shakespeare's most easily-recognized female lead — is foundational to our culture's understanding of girls, girls- becoming-women, of young women in love, and so on. As Jennifer Hulbert notes in "'Adolescence, Thy Name is Ophelia!': The Ophelia-ization of the Contemporary Teenage Girl" (2006), there are a variety of reasons for Juliet's centrality: "Juliet, as one half of Western drama's most glamorous couple, wins that title [most famous teenage girl] www.borrowers.uga.edu/783190/show 1/42 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation hands-down"; "too well adjusted to be an apt depiction of a girl who is too much put upon," she is "bold," a "strong . . . force," "a key inciter of the play's action. Her downfall is largely the fault of her own choices" and she "makes a conscious decision" to end her own life (2006, 202). In fact, aside from the romance and the (hot) male actors who often play Romeo in film versions, the popularity of Juliet among teenage girls might also be ascribed, at least in part, to this positive reading of her character. Juliet is a strong teenage girl who lives in a society that seeks to bend her to its conventions. She, however, defies both conventions and her parents (2006, 219 n. 9). Hulbert casts Juliet as a muscular resistor, defiant in the face of overwhelming authority, and in strong contrast to characters such as the "too much put upon," "pathetic" Ophelia (2006, 202).2 While I find this to be both an attractive and accurate reading, Hulbert overlooks one of Juliet's key strengths. Juliet is a deliberate re-maker: she resists, but her resistance is not simply a reflex, a teenagery rejection of authority. Juliet rejects her family in favor of a new identity, exchanging, as it were, a "dearest cousin for a dearer lord" (Romeo and Juliet 3.2.66). Juliet is active, purposeful resistant agent who choses to refashion herself in a better model.

It was in this sense of Juliet as an active agent who is also a contested center and who is herself at the center of an interrelated set of contests (between church and state, between state and family, between families, between love and family, between lover and family, and so on), that I turned to social media, in particular Facebook, to see how the struggle over Juliet is being played out: What is being said about her? How is she being represented? Are there patterns to be found? If so, what might those patterns suggest about whether scholarly understandings of the character are shared in the broader culture? The implications of what I found surprised me. Through a complex intersection of negotiation, resistance, and prosumption, we see not just a variety of reconfigurations of the character Juliet, for instance, along the lines of what Leisha Jones has called the "digital collective subject" (2011, 448), but a reconfiguration of Juliet's relationship with the world. This reconfiguration is happening not through the actions of an individual artist (much as Shakespeare refashioned Juliet when he appropriated her) but by the actions of thousands of individuals operating independently of each other; at the same time, many of these individuals are remaking themselves and others (whom they have already used in their remaking of Juliet) as Juliet. Facebook Juliet participates in Romeo and Juliet's already-long history of adaptation, as well as in long-established debates over what constitutes the essential, authentic Shakespeare; she demonstrates new ways of thinking about the character Juliet, including ways in which individuals relate to authorities of various stripes, as well as relate Juliet to themselves; she reveals the workings of a variety of aspects of our culture; and she models how to think about identity, identity construction, even reality itself in a social media world.

Ok, first of all. There are a lot of Juliets on Facebook. A lot. In March 2013, my first "Search for people, places, and things" using the two keywords "Juliet" and "Capulet" revealed at least 117 of her. Of these, two were "Interest" pages (one for "Juliet Capulet," one for "Juliet capulet").3 Otherwise, Juliet was a "Fictional Character" (25 pages) "Public Figure" (9 pages) "Actor/Director" (7 pages) "Community" or "Community Page" (67 pages) "Artist" (2 pages) "Writer" (1 page) "Teacher" (1 page) "Monarch" (1 page) A mere two Juliet Capulets were actual people, or they were according to Facebook's conventions: you could "friend" them.4 One had eight followers, 165 friends, and was very well travelled. The other "Worked at Montague Industrial," "Studied at the University of Verona," graduated from the Liceo Scientifico Girolamo Fracastoro (class of 1910), and, regarding relationships, commented that "It's complicated." She had two friends (Lena Pollich and Kelsey Sullivan) ("Juliet Capulet [1]" 2011). As interesting as the variety of "Juliet Capulet" accounts and pages were, matters became intriguing once I moved beyond that nomination. Broadening the search parameters, I found at least twenty-three Julie Capulets, twenty-five Julia Capulets, thirty-six Juliette Capulets, seven Julieta Capulets, and a Juliett Capulet. Unlike the prevalence of Pages for "Juliet Capulet," all but two of the "Juli* Capulet" hits were personal accounts: they could be friended.

www.borrowers.uga.edu/783190/show 2/42 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation In November and December of 2013, Facebook's upgraded search feature returned a substantively different set of results when performing the same two-keyword "Juliet Capulet" search. There were more Juliets. Many, many more. Now, results are divided into six categories — All Results, People, Pages, Groups, Apps, and Events — rather than one aggregate results page, and the hits on each page differ. Although Juliet Capulets who are People might appear in the "All Results" set, their pages do not appear in the Pages results, for example. However, while there are visibly more Juliets, Facebook does not always make all of the Juliets visible. When typing in search terms, a prompt to "See more results for 'juliet capulet'" appears at the bottom of the pull-down menu that appears, but the results queue stops expanding at 100 hits. Although a "more results" icon appears at the bottom of the queue after the 100th hit and a progress bar activates when that icon is clicked, the queue not only refuses to expand but the more results icon also disappears, suggesting that there are only 100 Juliet Capulets to find. However, the "See more results" results are not so simple as returning 100 different people, pages, groups, apps and events from a single search. In the Juliet Capulet search, fifteen "People" do not appear in the "All Results" page, which makes sense: space must be made for Pages, groups, and the like. However, nine "People" appeared in the "All Results" results but not in the "People" results: the "actual" Juliet Capulet results, then, seemed to number 109, with possibly many more who did not make the cut. And who might not have made that cut? Juliets who aren't very active. Facebook's algorithm appears not to approve of them. Juliet Capulet (1) and Juliet Capulet (3) appeared in neither the All Results nor the People queues: though their accounts were still active (at least as of 15 December 2013), neither had updated her account since early 2011 (11 April and 17 March, respectively).

This discrepancy suggests that more Juliets await just offstage, which is, in fact, the case. Another option on the search feature's pull-down is "Find all people named 'juliet capulet'" (see figure 1).

Figure 1. Screenshot of search for 'juliet capulet' Click "Find all people," and Facebook reports that there are "More Than 1,000 People" with the words "Juliet" and "Capulet" in their names. Clicking at the bottom of the scroll bar on the right side of the browser window prompts Facebook to report that it is "Loading more results," and twenty minutes' worth of clicking at a rate of about one click every two seconds still doesn't get to the end of the list. An overview of these searches reveals 2,695 Juliet www.borrowers.uga.edu/783190/show 3/42 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Capulets for a search that is incomplete. And unlike the March search, almost all of these Juliets can be friended: so far as Facebook is concerned, they are real people.5

Not only are the new search results more fulsome, but the two-keyword "Juliet Capulet" search is more specific since the upgrade. The algorithm performs a generally accurate keyword search when "Find[ing] all people": it usually returns pages with the words "Juliet" and "Capulet" in their names, including what Facebook describes as "alternate name[s]," "another name you're known by," such as a nickname, a title, a professional name, or maiden name ("What alternate" 2013; see also "How do I display" 2013). Alternate names appear in parentheses, such as Juliet Capulet (Alexis Sanders) ("Juliet Capulet [7]" 2010); Farzana Toro (Juliet Capulet) ("Farzana" 2013); and Parisa Juliet (Capulet) ("Parisa" 2013).6 Similarly, hyphenates such as Juliet Capulet-Montague and Juliet Castillejos- Castromayor Capulet-Montague appear ("Juliet Capulet-Montague" 2013; "Juliet Castillejos" 2013). As suggested above, the algorithm is not perfect: though it seems able to read macrons and international characters (or at least an l with stroke), as in Juliett Anne Capulet ("Juliet Anne Capulet" 2013), some results do not include both search terms, such as Ezgi C. Capulet (MertKültür) ("Ezgi" 2013). What does not appear in the November/December "Juliet Capulet" search are all of the Julia Capulets, Juliette Capulets, Julie Capulets, and Julie Caps, the Juliette Montagues and the single-name Juliets (which includes every person, Page, group, app and event with any possible variation on "Juliet" somewhere in his, her, or its name). Each of these variations needs to be searched for separately: "See[ing] more results" for each of them returns mostly chock-full queues (though there are only twenty Juliette Montagues), while "Find all people" searches for Julie Capulet and Julie Cap returned 380 and forty hits, respectively, before "End of results" finally appeared.7

Taken together, these searches indicate that there are easily more than 3,500 Juliets roaming Facebook, and that's just a partial survey of the personal accounts: the count does not include the Pages, groups, apps or events or those variations on her name I might not have considered yet (such as "Julieta Capulet," a variant I blundered into in late December, 2013 — I wasn't looking specifically for her — of whom there are sixty-eight). Because of the astonishing complexity of the site and the jaw-dropping number of pages it contains, to say nothing of those Pages, groups, or personal accounts that users or Facebook itself has deleted or of those that might be added after this has been written, it is difficult to say how many Facebook Juliets there were, are, or ever shall be. Given the company's self-reported 1.267 billion monthly active users (MAUs) ("Form 10-Q" 2014, 21), there could be a nearly bottomless well of Juliets on Facebook.

IN HER OWN WORDS So what do all of these Juliets have to say for themselves? As one might expect, in November and December of 2013, Juliet's life has moved on from mid-March. Juliet (no period) now has only forty-nine likes, down from fifty- one: she is less popular. Juliet's career trajectory has changed from Artist to Author, and she continues actively to maintain her Page, as do many of the Juliets who hold personal accounts, adding friends, likes, and photos, posting status updates, and so on. Juliet Capulet [2] and Juliet Capulet [17] are gone altogether: pasting the URLs for their page into a browser takes me to my own Facebook Wall. If it were not for previous versions of this essay, I would not know about them, and as far as Facebook is concerned, neither ever existed. What happened is anybody's guess, and their ghostly presence here is an indication of social media's evanescence, as well as a suggestion of the challenges posed by social media research in general: people, pages, feeds, and accounts are twenty-first century will-o'-the-wisps. This fugitive aspect of social media use is enhanced by the nature of Facebook itself, where accounts can be deactivated, deleted, disabled, or suspended, the distinctions being that while a deactivation (which is user-initiated) can be reversed at the user's request, a deletion (also performed at the user's request) is permanent, while suspension and disabling happen because Facebook thinks the user was bad: in its words, "We disable Facebook accounts that violate our terms" ("Disabled" 2013; see also "Deactivating" 2013). The distinction between disabling and suspension is somewhat opaque, though suspension seems to be a temporary measure for some malfeasance (see "Facebook Community Standards" 2013 and "Statement" 2013), while disabling is more permanent, Facebook's nuclear option, as it were.

And as for the Juliets who remain? As one might assume, Juliet has a home, with an address and everything. In fact, she has at least three: 123 Star-Crossed, Verona, Italy 37121 ("Juliet Capulet [2]" 2013); Verona street [sic] 88, Mansion 12, Verona, Italy 881249 ("Juliet Capulet [4]" 2013); and Via Cappello 23, 37121 Verona, Italy ("Juliet www.borrowers.uga.edu/783190/show 4/42 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Capulet [5]" 2011).8 She does not just live in Verona, though: she has cribs in College Station, Texas ("Juliet Capulet [8]" 2013), Halifax, Nova Scotia ("Juliet Capulet [9]" 2012), Paderborn, Germany ("Juliet Capulet [10]" 2013), Vinnitsa, Vinnyst'Ka Oblast,' Ukraine ("Juliet Capulet [11]" 2013), and Jakarta, Indonesia ("Juliet Capulet [12]" 2013), to name but a few. Juliet has gone global. Nothing new or surprising in that. What is surprising is how quickly the polynational Juliet asserted herself in the search results: the first twenty-two hits in the "Find all people named 'juliet capulet'" search represented Juliets from at least seven different countries (four specifically from the U.S., two from Canada, two from Italy, one each from Australia, Ireland, Germany, and Indonesia, with the remaining ten having no particular location indicated next to their thumbnails). As for her education, Juliet was home schooled ("Juliet Montague [3]" 2012), though it appears she also studied at Verona High School ("Juliet Capulet [13]" 2010), Lord Beaverbrook High ("Juliet Capulet [6]" 2010), Colegio William Shakespeare ("Juliet Capulet [14]" 2010), the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign ("Juliet Capulet-Montague" 2013), along with Soul Reaper Academy (in Reseda, California),9 and The High School of Love ("Juliette Capulet" 2012).

So far as personal relationships go, her status seems to depend on when exactly in her life one encounters Juliet. No one ought to be surprised that she "Works at Loving Romeo at all times!"("Julie Capulet" 2013), nor that she says that her relationship with Romeo may be "complicated" ("Juliet Capulet [6]" 2010; see also "Juliet Cap [1]" 2012). And it also makes sense that she is married to Romeo Montague (or Montegue, or Mont Ague, or Rome Montague, or Romeo TheMontague, or Romeao Montagué). At least fifteen of the Juliets indicate that they are widowed, suggesting that she took a moment between her husband's death and stabbing herself in the chest to update her profile (see "Juliet Montague [4]" 2012 or "Juliet Capulet [15] 2011). Some may be startled to find that she is "in an open relationship" (e.g., "Juliet Montague [2]" 2012 and "Juliet Capulet [11]" 2013).

And how does Juliet spend her days? Charmingly, she "Worked at Being the Best Daughter" ("Juliette Montague" 2013) and is "President at Making everyone happy" ("Juliet Capulet [2]" 2013), though her parents, Nurse and the Friar might dispute these assertions. When she isn't "Being a Princess" ("Juliett Capulet" 2010), she "Works at Peacemaker" ("Juliet Montague [3]" 2012), though she does have her moments: a "Former Lazy Teen at The insane asylum for the chronicly stupid," she doesn't read, and has this to say for herself: "I just sit around, and let my drunk nurse do everything" ("Juliet Montague [1]" 2011) and "dad has money dont need job" ("Juliet Cap Ulet" 2011). She listens to Pitbull ("Juliet Capulet [10]" 2013), Mozart ("Juliette Montague" 2013), Coldplay ("Juliet Anne Capulet 2013), Michael Bublé ("Juliet Cap [2]" 2011) and Pink ("Juliet Capulet [16]" 2011). Distressingly, she watches Keeping Up with the Kardashians ("Juliet Cap [3]" n.d.), though she gains some cred back because she plays in a band that sounds like "Alanis Morissette, Paramore, The Cardigans, NIDJI, [and] The London Suede" ("Juliet Capulet [12]" 2013; "Capulet" 2013). She does come across as rather self-involved, judging from the number of selfies — self portraits — she posts, she loves her new tattoo ("Juliet C" 2013) and is keen on others' body art, too ("Juliet" 2013). Go figure, her personal interests are Romeo Romeo Formal parties Romeo. ("Juliet Capulet [4]" 2013) She is religious, or at least interested in religion; she both reads and likes the Bible ("Capulet Juliet [4]" 2014) and reads the Q'uran and likes Islam-centered Facebook Pages that post inspirational messages ("Juliet Montague [4]" 2012). She likes cuddling ("Julie Capulet" 2013). These descriptions and epithets indicate the variety of ways in which Juliet has moved into — or been moved into — popular culture: individual Juliets participate in a welter of relationship statuses, political commitments, and artistic media and genres. When taken together, Facebook Juliet demonstrates a thorough (though perhaps unaware) involvement in culturally up-to-date postmodern pastiche.

Temperamentally, Juliet is all over the map. As might be expected, she frets about having to wait around for her Romeo to show up (see "Juliette Montague" 2013 and "Juliet Capulet [16]" 2011) and is inclined to despair: "I shall never marry paris I rather be dead" ("Juliette Montague" 2013) and "Ugh fml [fuck my life]!! worried & scared & just don't know what to do anymore! :("("Juliet Capulet [9]" 2012). Although she has her low periods, she is proud of what she accomplished as the president of her college's chapter of ALPFA (Association of Latino Professionals in Finance and Accounting) ("Juliet Capulet-Montague" 2013), and she has her happy moments: "party time! Get your mask on!" ("Juliet Capulet [5]" 2011), and "Can't stop thinking about romeo as sweet as thy rose.!" and www.borrowers.uga.edu/783190/show 5/42 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation "Romeo im so Glad were married.! Art tho my beautiful and beloved husband!" ("Julie Capulet" 2013). Despite all of her difficulties — in addition to her romantic and familial challenges, she also reveals that she has leukemia and is out of her meds ("Juliet Montague [2]" 2012) — Juliet can even be light-hearted, describing herself as "Sono solo tutte puttanate" ("It is all just rubbish") and has an introspective side: "Non so chi sono, non so cosa diventerò" ("I do not know who I am, I do not know what I will become" ("Juliet" 2013) (trans. Maurizio Calbi (2014). She does get angry — "Totally po'd" ("Juliet Capulet [13]" 2010) — and can be surprisingly foul-mouthed: "Works at none of your fuckin' business, STALKERS" ("Julia Cap" 2013; see also "Juliet Capulet [4]" 2013).

Depending on how you look at it, Juliet's English can be taken on a scale ranging from vibrant to eye-wateringly bad. On occasion she does speak in her "native tongue," as in "O comfortable, friar! Where is my lord? I do remember well where I should be, And there I am. Where is my Romeo" ("Juliet Capulet [7]" 2010) and "My only love sprung from my only hate! Too early seen unknown, and known too late! Prodigious birth of love it is to me that I must love a loathed enemy" ("Juliet Capulet [9]" 2012), but I have only found one instance where she preserves her own verse form ("Juliet Capulet [17]" 2013). More often than not, she is colloquial, idiomatic, and slangy: "Drop me a t-bomb, chillin' in Verona" ("Juliet Capulet [6]" 2010); "Friar Lawrence has helped put an end to this ridiculous fantasy of County Paris and I. Haha fat chance. Soon enough my parents and Nurse will regret their decision in forcing me into this nightmare" ("Juliet Capulet [15]" 2011); "im in love with Romeo why is there all this hate" ("Juliet Capulet [3]" 2011); and "Rip tybalt, gunna miss u cuz! [heavy black heart emoji]" ("Juliet Capulet [9]" 2012). Sometimes, Juliet mixes things up, as is the case with Juliette Capulet: "Romeo I miss you if only we could be together . . . O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo . . . I shall never marry paris I rather be dead" (Juliette Capulet 2012) She can be funny: "Paris, ugh get lost #canyounot" ("Capulet Juliet [2]" 2013) and IM MARRYING PARIS IN TWO DAYS?!?! NOT HAPPENING MOM #IMWITHROMEO #DUH ("Juliet Capulet [20]" 2014) On occasion, she lapses into text-speak, as with "OMG IM FB FAMOSA LOLZ YALL" ("Juliet Montague [2]" 2012). Once, she goes all reflexive, glossing and interpreting her own utterances: "Dost thou love me? I know thou wilt say 'Ay,' And I will take thy word: yet if thou swear'st, Thou mayst prove false; at lovers' perjuries They say, Jove laughs. O gentle Romeo, If thou dost love, pronounce it faithfully" Juliet/Act 2 Scene 2/ juliet is talking to romeo asking him if he loves her. this is important because without it they might have not pronounced their love that night. ("Juliet Capulet [18]" 2010) Juliet is also multi-lingual: she knows Italian ("Juliet" 2013), Spanish ("Juliet C" 2013), Russian and Ukranian ("Juliet Capulet [11]" 2013), German ("Juliet Capulet [10]" 2013), Turkish ("Ezgi" 2013) and Arabic ("Juliet Montague [4]" 2012 and "Juliet Capulet [19]" 2013). Having facility in none of these languages myself, I cannot say whether she is any better in them that she is in her cradle tongue, if "cradle tongue" can even be applied to Facebook Juliet. For all of her linguistic prowess, and although she can be funny now and then, Juliet does not have much of a sense of humor overall. Even when her posts come across as superficial or inappropriately light in tone — "gunna miss u cuz! [heavy black heart emoji]" — they are grounded in pain. Despite their apparent frippery, posts such as these suggest an awareness of the playtext's own tonal and structural complexity, a tragedy written over a comic structure that celebrates language play while satirizing those, like Romeo, who celebrate language "improperly" by wallowing in linguistic excess.

As I indicated, a lot of Juliets, and the answer to what they have to say for themselves is, "a lot." With that comes a knotty problem: teasing out the ways in which individual Juliets signify while trying to discern an overall picture of how Juliet (and, by extension, Shakespeare) signifies on the platform as a whole. This is not made easier by the fact that some individuals, such as Juliet, say quite a few things, while others, like Juliet Montague [1], say comparatively little or even nothing at all, as with Juliet Capulet [8]. Taken as a group, however, the Facebook Juliet that gradually emerges from the normative pressures of the platform is pretty, polyracial, and youthful; generally but not exclusively heterosexual and not an especially active sexual agent; not very friendly — one might even call her isolated — and in her interpersonal relationships relatively though not entirely drama-free; and while seeming superficially to be a conformist, at least as far as Facebook is concerned, a playful experimenter with and subverter of identity. www.borrowers.uga.edu/783190/show 6/42 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation

JULIET: YOUNG, BEAUTIFUL, AND POLYRACIAL The most immediately apparent aspect of Facebook Juliet is that she's astonishingly good looking. A great many of her Profile pictures feature Claire Danes or Olivia Hussey, mostly in shots from Baz Luhrmann's 1996 William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet or Franco Zeffirelli's 1968 Romeo and Juliet respectively, but there are also a few from later in their lives (see figure 2): of these, the great majority of the Danes pictures are iconic shots of her gazing at Romeo through the fish tank or of her leaning on her balcony railing, adorned with an angel's wings; the Hussey pictures are more varied, but common among them are her own balcony shots and close-ups from the masked ball.10

Figure 2. Profile Pictures: Olivia Hussey and Claire Danes as Juliet When Danes and Hussey exit the scene, other celebrities of various magnitudes take over: Juliet looks a lot like Lily Collins, Lady Gaga, Michelle Trachtenberg, Jamie Lynn Spears, Anne Hathaway, Emily Osment, Megan Fox, Blake Lively, Michelle Obama, Mallika Sherawat, Kate Winslett, Amanda Seyfried, Nelena, Carrie Underwood, Selena Gomez, Vanessa Hudgins, Melodie Gibeau, Marilyn Monroe, Aswariya Rai, Julia Allison, Jasmine Villegas, Molly C. Quinn, Elizabeth Mitchell, Emma Stone, Nina Dobrev, Emma Watson, Princess Diana, Hailee Steinfeld, Juliette Lewis, Angelina Jolie, Gwenyth Paltrow, Nina Dobrev, and Bar Refaeli (see figure 3). And this list only scratches the surface — there are many, many more out there.

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Figure 3. Profile Pictures: Celebrities as Juliet Many of the personal accounts that seem like they could be of real people feature Profile pictures taken from flattering angles, in decent, if not outright good light and with some digital manipulation in evidence, with the women demonstrating attractive behaviors, smiling, laughing, and the like — along with the occasional duck lips pose (see figure 4).11

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Figure 4. Profile Pictures: People Themselves as Juliet Some of the Juliets represent themselves with images from other media, ranging from traditional European portraiture to pinups, movie posters, manga, anime, and digital imagery (figure 5).

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Figure 5. Profile Pictures: Representations of Juliet from Other Media While young, Juliet's no kid: late teens into the early twenties seems closer to the mean (given some older outliers and excepting Hussey and Danes). That fact notwithstanding, these images, be they of actual account holders, of celebrities, or imported from other media, make it apparent that Juliet's appearance is conceived of in accord with those notions of feminine beauty that are received and perpetuated through mass media (see figure 6).

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Figure 6. Screenshot, First Screen of Results of Three-keyword 'what is pretty' Google Image Search Classic markers of female beauty are abundant: bilaterally symmetrical faces; unblemished complexions; bright, clear, often large eyes; long, flowing hair; and slender, if not outright and even impossibly skinny physiques (though when Juliet has got it, she flaunts it). These images are almost always framed and lit to enhance the subject's face and/or body (and not just in the shots of professionally made-up actors and models who are experienced in holding their bodies and expressions so they are at their most attractive for a professional photographer and whose faces often benefit from digital fiddling before the photographs are published). In general, Facebook Juliet endorses and fosters widespread notions of what is "pretty.12

Looking past all of the pulchritude, it becomes clear that while Juliet predominantly conceives of herself as white, she also thinks of herself as Black, Indian, Latina, Hispanic, or Indonesian — and again, this list just scratches the surface. In her analysis of the semiotics of race in a performance of The Winter's Tale, Ayanna Thompson argues that "the races, ethnicities, and colors of the actors were not semiotically relevant in the production . . . Their color . . . was not highlighted, questioned, or brought into the semiotic realm of the production; we, the audience, were not supposed to think about race and/or color in this production" (2008-2009; see also Thompson 2006, 7, 10-12, 16). Her comment is pertinent here: the "casting" of Juliet on Facebook seems colorblind, and the "audience" does not appear to have been asked to think about race and/or color. None of the individual Juliets that I have considered specifically comments on the race of her visual representation, and while the visual evidence of a "different" ethnicity is impossible to miss — and thus could be considered to be "highlighted," though this is a consideration that Margo Hendricks's essay "Gestures of Performance: Rethinking Race in Contemporary Shakespeare" challenges (2006, 201) — any interrogation of Juliet's race or the Facebook audience's assumptions about her race seems more implicit than explicit. More broadly, the variety of racial representations on Facebook supports the notion that Juliet is a trans-racial signifier: she matters in some way in a range of cultures. Put another way, I do not see evidence of what Lisa Nakamura describes as "identity tourism," in which online performances use "race and gender as amusing prostheses to be donned and shed without 'real life' consequences" (2002, 13-14; see also www.borrowers.uga.edu/783190/show 11/42 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Thompson 2011, 147-48, 157, 158 and 160). Even more profoundly, I think, the polyracial Facebook Juliet illustrates how the character is being remade (over and over again) to suit the users' own assumptions and needs.13

SEXUAL JULIET Juliet appears to be almost entirely heterosexual. So far, I have found only one page that overtly indicates that she is bi-sexual or lesbian: Juliet Rose Capulet-Halliwell has "liked" three LGBT Facebook groups and expresses desire for another woman: "Hey girl, guess what? If you don't make her yours, I'll take her." None of the remaining Juliets I have considered so far even seemed covert in the suggestion that they were lesbian, bi-sexual, transsexual, or questioning (though given the huge number of pages being dealt with here, it is possible that many LBTQ Juliets populate Facebook). This heteronormative representation is at odds with academic culture, where the queer or queer-influenced analysis of Shakespeare is well established, and with popular culture as well, where lesbian Juliets can be found on YouTube (marckerr92 2008, lilmissgiggles32 2013, almagomezschool 2014), in indie/cult films (Tromeo and Juliet 1997), in international films (Rome & Juliet 2006), in hard-core pornography (West Side 2000), onstage (Philadelphia's Curio Theatre Company's fall 2013 production; see Piepenburg 2013), and in fan fiction (BrandiJenner 2014, Pattinson n.d.). It is also at odds with the way in which Juliet's race and nationality are busily being remade on Facebook: with regard to sexual identity, the site seems to exert conservative pressure, or perhaps it rewards heteronorming by pushing heterosexual Juliets further up in the algorithmically-driven results queue. Whatever her orientation, on the whole, Facebook Juliet demonstrates little erotic heat. Much of the time, the Juliets do little other than express desire for their Romeos in sweet but mild terms, such as "I [small + cute heart emoji] Romeo Montague xox" ("Juliet Capulet [2]" 2013) or "My husband Romeo has been banished for the killing of my cousin, and all i have is the memory of his sweet kiss and the ring he planted on my finger" ("Juliet Capulet [3]" 2011). Give me my Romeo, and when I shall die Take him and cut him out in little stars, And he will make the face of heaven so fine That all the world will be in love with night And pay no worship to the garish sun. (Romeo and Juliet 3.2.21-25; "Juliet Capulet [17]" 2013) More often, she does so in modern argot: "I am madly in love with this dude that crashed my parents party. HE IS SOOOOO HOT!!!!" ("Juliet Montague [1]" 2011). Juliet Capulet [1] writes that she has learned to fall backwards, a stage beyond Nurse's promise that she will learn about that (Romeo and Juliet 1.3.43-44, 57-58); Juliet "likes it in Romeo's room" (Juliet Capulet [13]" 2010), but what exactly she likes is left up to the imagination; and she hilariously (though I think unintentionally) lets the world know that "I am no longer a maiden. My Romeo did come!" (Juliet Capulet [15] 2011). Very rarely, however, is she verbally explicit about her desires, though when she is, as is the case with Juliet Rose, she doesn't hold back, and Romeo's response is enthusiastic: "yeeeeeeeeeeeeee:". Juliet Capulet [4] asks Romeo for anal sex; is Juliet expressing a little anarchic desire, revising herself by making explicit possibilities heretofore only implicit in her epithalamium (3.2.1-31)? Is she taking a swat at decorous conceptions of her character, which could be taken to include those in the Shakespeare playtext itself, where Juliet does speak of her desires but does not specify exactly what she desires to do (with? to?) Romeo . . . or what she wants him to do with/to her? Has she been hacked? The request for anal sex does appear more than two years after the next most recent post and was posted via mobile device: maybe Juliet left her smartphone lying around and Mercutio got ahold of it — it certainly sounds like him. (If it is a hack, it may be that the hacker her- or himself is expressing some resistance or rejection of the sexually decorous Juliet. Or maybe just trying to embarrass or humiliate the account holder. That, too, would not be unlike Mercutio.) While it is unclear to me whether Facebook Juliet is disinclined to sex or is being discrete, the overall representation of the character is at odds with scholarly (and some theatrical) understandings of a more active sexual agent,14 though this conservative representation does generally align with how Juliet is conceived popularly (see Hendershott-Kraetzer 2012, 18-34). It may also be that Facebook itself exerts a normalizing pressure on how the character is represented, irrespective of however Facebook Juliet's creators may conceive of her.15 (Given what I take to be the relatively high proportion of what appear to be school-generated Pages and accounts that I found, the sexual agency-suppressing activity of school, parents, and/or peer groups may also have a bearing on how the character is represented.)

www.borrowers.uga.edu/783190/show 12/42 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Juliet does show her sexuality, rather than talk about it, though this is more rare than one might think, given the pressure exerted by Facebook itself for accounts and Pages to be as much visual as verbal, if not more so:

Figure 7. Erotic visuals on Capulet Juliet [1]'s Facebook Timeline

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Figure 8. Erotic Profile Pictures on Juliet Montague [3]'s Timeline In both of these instances — the only two I've yet found that visually depict Juliet's sexuality — Juliet tends to be dominant over Romeo. Reversing this pattern is an older one of Capulet Juliet [3]'s profile pics, visible in the photos portlet at the center left of figure 7: a close up of Romeo behind Juliet, kissing the nape of her neck, his hand either caressing or grasping her throat. That this visual has been supplanted by one of a partially naked Juliet kneeling above a partially naked, prone Romeo suggests that Juliet sees this image as a more accurate, more up to date or more desirable representation of herself. (In this, the account holder is more in line with scholarly understandings of the character; see for example Brown 1996, 334.) These two examples appear to be exceptions to the pattern, however: although the female body of Facebook Juliet is often on display (see figures 3-5 and the photos portlet in figure 8), her sexually active body is not. Curiously, whatever the particulars of her sexual agency may be, the ways in which Juliet codifies her relationship with Romeo conform to the circumscriptions set out by Facebook itself. For instance, "Married," "Widowed," "In a relationship," and "It's complicated" are all options in the pull-down menu Facebook offers when editing "Basic Info" in one's profile, as is "In an open relationship."16 Others that are available but that I have not yet seen selected are "Single," "Engaged," "In a civil union," "In a domestic partnership," "Separated" and "Divorced." No relationship at all seems to be an option, too, a kind of relational null set.

OH, WHAT A LONELY GIRL Juliet does not have many friends (at least, she's not much friended or doesn't friend others very much). For example, Juliet (one name only) is a community with 51 likes, while Juliet. (the period is specific) has 18,701; Juliet Capulet [10] has 202 friends, while Juliet Montague [4] is lonely indeed, with only one. This may be an effect of the sheer number of accounts and Pages one encounters. Which would you friend? Who's the "real" Juliet? Profile pictures aren't any help because so many of them are exactly the same, and those that aren't are of celebrities, and www.borrowers.uga.edu/783190/show 14/42 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation those pictures that don't appear to be of celebrities, that look like they're of "real" people, are often of celebrities or models that haven't been recognized as such. Along with this is the strong sense I have that many of these accounts were created as school projects or even on a lark, after which a smattering of chums and FB pals created a remedial social network with friends or classmates before the project was abandoned. Ironically for a character who advises against "rash" and sudden actions (Romeo and Juliet 2.2.118), Juliet joins Facebook, engages in a flurry of activity, posting pictures, some likes and a cluster of status updates, and then never updates the account again. This activity usually happens over the course of one to three days in months right around the end of an academic term or semester (October-December and April-May are common months; see "Juliet Cap" [4]" 2013 and "Capulet Juliet [4]" 2013, for example. Ultimately, the reasons why many of the Juliets joined Facebook remain opaque. If any of the pages are, in fact, the result of school assignments, I am uncertain as to their educational benefit. In "Teaching Shakespeare with YouTube," Christy Desmet argues that that social media platform "is perfect for the kind of peer review that we want students to engage in as they write, create, and revise their work in different media" (2009, 65) and that it should [be] used[d] . . . in the classroom both to analyze primary Shakespearean texts . . . and to generate topics for creating and standards for evaluating students' productions. In this way, YouTube videos can become a locus for honing students' skills in critical reading and writing. (2009, 65-66) This is an argument that Ayanna Thompson extends and complicates in Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America: "If performance facilitates a deeper and more complex understanding of the Shakespearean text, what happens when a performance complicates the identity politics within the classroom?" (2011, 166). It is difficult to say whether honing critical skills or a discussion of identity politics is happening on or because of these Facebook pages. Granted, I am not friends with any of the Facebook Juliets, so there may be a wealth of critical interchange happening outside my line of sight, but then again, many of the Juliets seem to have set their privacy levels pretty low.17 What is available to the un-Friended viewer suggests requirements to identify passages that are important or essential to the character either in her own words or in those of other characters (see "Juliet Capulet" [7]" 2010); these may be coupled with requirements that the student summarize/paraphrase the lines or provide brief interpretive comments (see "Juliet Capulet [19]" 2013). There are also accounts and Pages that indicate a requirement to imaginatively enter the character's psychology ("Juliet Capulet [19]" 2013 or "Juliet" 2010, for instance), in a manner similar to that described by Eileen McBride and Kimberly Hall in "Facebook: Role Play in a Psychology Class" (2012, 315-17), though on a much more limited scale. Then, too, the Page creators and account holders may be using these projects to subvert popular, received notions of Juliet, such as by "dirtying up" an "innocent" character by having her ask for oral or anal sex, or they may critically engage their classwork after the fact without specific guidance or direction. They may be building accounts or Pages that satisfy some personal interest or need; Elliot T. Panek, Yioryos Nardis and Sara Konrath suggest that at least one such need is narcissistic (2013, 2008-10), a subject to which I return below. Or, as Sujata Iyengar and Christy Desmet suggest in their discussion of YouTube Ophelias, the character may be "comprehensible only to members of a specific, sometimes tiny, interpretive community for whom and among whom it was designed" (2012, 62).

Usually, Juliet's circle is restricted to her fellow Veronese, though sometimes other people appear, both real and from fictional sources (see figures 10-12). Whenever it can, Facebook will encourage the people who are visiting personal accounts' walls (people such as myself) to reach out and friend the individual with a cheerful "Do you know Juliet? To see what she shares with friends, send her a friend request." Facebook will do this no matter how open or closed Juliet is: personal accounts that appear open to the world (as is the case with "Julia Cap" and her turbulent home life) can be friended, as can accounts that are about as revealing as, well, a wall.

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Figure 9. The Unwelcoming Timeline of Juliet Capulet [14]

More revealing than the number of friends that Juliet has, however, is how she interacts with them. None of the Juliets I considered showed any posts on others' pages, even Romeo's. In her online life, as in her Veronese world, Juliet seems to live in an isolated little bubble. In one odd instance, Juliet posts a screenshot of a Facebook chat with Romeo, in which Romeo never engages with her.

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Figure 10. Juliet Capulet [13)'s 'Talk' with Romeo This is more Juliet the stalker rather than idealized youthful lover. In a similar vein, very few of her comments are liked, let alone commented on: this is exceptionally unusual for Facebook, where people will like and comment on all manner of things, especially emotive posts describing joy, fretfulness, pain, or worry. However, more often than not, Juliet's posts go almost unnoticed and unremarked. Figures 11 and 12 show two of the more spirited exchanges that I found:

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Figure 11. Juliet Capulet [1]'s Exchanges with Friends

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Figure 12. Juliet Capulet [16]'s Exchanges with Romeo The first, between Juliet Capulet [1] and her friends is fairly representative of a Facebook interchange. Juliet launches comments in a variety of tones to the universe — loving and sincere, as regards her nurse; sardonic, as regards her impending marriage; and fretful, regarding Paris — and she gets responses. One set of comments takes the form of a micro-debate about marrying at a young age, while another is a brief exchange about her friends' experiences with nurses. One of her friends even gets up into Juliet's grill, taking her to task for questioning Paris's suitability and for moaning and groaning about being married. In figure 12, the second set, from Juliet Capulet [16], we see Juliet and Romeo interacting directly, giving us a rare, for Facebook, inside look at Juliet's anxiety before her secret nuptials. Contrary to what one might expect, direct interactions between Juliet and her Romeo seem to be few and far between: she comments on him often and posts pictures of him, but the two do not often speak.

Thus, Juliet's posts tend to go unremarked. In addition, although she describes her own drama, she tends not to engage in drama. Obviously enough, she is frustrated with her family, the feud, and the complications to her romantic life. However, Juliet's self-destructive inclinations are not on display as much as I had expected, given her propensity to threaten self-harm (see Romeo and Juliet 3.5.243 and 4.1.52-59; see also 3.2.143-47 and 3.5.200-202). Only seven of the Facebook Juliets indicate suicidal thoughts: "Oh Romeo, have you left this world without me? nay, i shall joineth you . . . we shall part from this world together . . . — [crying face emoji] feeling Empty" ("Parisa Juliet [Capulet]" 2013); "I RATHER DIE THEN MARRY COUNTY PARIS HE IS NOT MY TRUE LOVE, NOT MY HUSBAND, ROMEO IS! I have no one but Romeo. My father, Mother and NURSE betrayed me. How could she do this. Friar Lawrence will help me or else . . " and "Life is empty without Romeo, there is no point for me to be left on earth. Oh happy dagger, this is thy sheath. There rust and let me die!"("Juliet Capulet [15]" 2011); "I shall never marry paris I rather be dead" ("Julia Capulet" 2012) — a comment, incidentally, that is liked by www.borrowers.uga.edu/783190/show 19/42 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Romeo; "Oh Romeo why did you have to die? I shall kill myself too. YOLO (Yee Only liveth Once" ("Juliet Cap" [4] 2013); "IM done with all this crap. im just gonna kill myself. goodbye world" ("July Capulet" 2013); "RIP Romeo I will love you forever and I can not exist without you, I need to end my life" ("Juliet Capulet [20]" 2014); and a rather shocking status update in which Juliet wants to die by "shov[ing] poison down my vagina" while having anal sex with Romeo ("Juliet Capulet [4]" 2013). One Juliet memorializes herself but does not specify an intention to kill herself: R.I.P. Juliet Capulet(Montague) and her dear husband Romeo Montague ("Juliet Capulet [3]" 2011) Those aside, Juliet's posts stress her confusion over loving a Montague, her love for Romeo, or her misery at not being able to be with him because of extrinsic circumstances. But no matter what she is directing to her friends, the majority of her comments seem lost in a void.

In a way, this paucity of reactions to Juliet's thoughts is of a piece with the Shakespearean playtext. Juliet, a lonely girl to begin with, becomes ever more isolated as the plot unrolls: she sets aside her family for her new husband, loses her cousin to that husband, then learns that her husband has been banished; her parents shun her, she is betrayed by, and then shuns, the Nurse, her one confidante; fearing betrayal by the Friar and possessed by a ghastly vision of lonely insanity in her family's tomb, she wakes in that tomb to find herself widowed, and thereafter is betrayed by the Friar, abandoned to commit her final self-destruction. So it should not be especially surprising that Juliet has few friends nor that her last, desperate declarations go unnoticed by the world. In fact, it should come as more of a surprise when Facebook Juliet reveals a wealth of friends and followers, a revelation of a part of Juliet's life beyond that revealed or even suggested by the Shakespearean source. None of the Juliets who articulate suicidal intentions appear to hover over the decision to kill herself; there is no discussion of the psychology of a would-be suicide; surprisingly, no one (other than the one Romeo) even makes note of her declaration, let alone tries to talk her out of it. None of the accounts have been turned into memorial walls, though according to Facebook itself, "we . . . set privacy so that only confirmed friends can see the profile or locate it in a search" (Kelly 2009). It could be argued that in the preponderance of accounts and Pages that do not demonstrate an explicit suicidal ideation or that even continue to update Juliets' timelines we are seeing Juliets who reject Juliet's final option; it may be that the Facebook Juliets are embracing Juliet as "a strong teenage girl who lives in a society that seeks to bend her to its conventions . . . [but] defies both conventions and her parents" (Hulbert 2006, 219), even to the extent of defying the parent text. However, both of these cases would be a difficult to make, attempts to fill an aporia with intentionality. Here, Facebook Juliet remains frustrating, troubling, indeterminate, though the ways in which her life is reconfigured online may help to clarify what we are seeing.

WHAT A CHANGE IS HERE Facebook Juliet is not only reconfiguring aspects of the Shakespearean Juliet's personality: she is restructuring Juliet's entire life, such as by compressing her relationship with Romeo. For instance, Juliet Capulet [3] joined Facebook, met Romeo, and announced her own death all in one hurricane of a day, 17 March 2011 (although she was born on 2 May 1952, making her fifty-nine years old at the time). Other Juliets' lives are similarly compressed, but none as completely and none in the first person (yes, Juliet can be arch, referring to herself as "she"). At other times, Facebook Juliet doesn't reflect all of the playtextual Juliet's life: plain Juliet joined Facebook on 21 April 2010, describes the highlights of her first playtextual day — noting that a brawl took place in the streets, talking with mom about some Paris guy, going to the party, meeting and talking with Romeo, and brooding afterwards about Romeo's identity — but then she recedes into a profound silence ("Juliet" 2010), leaving friends and Facebook stalkers alike to wonder what happened. Things were looking so promising, after all.

This last reveals another way in which Facebook Juliet reconfigures Shakespeare's Juliet: as indicated in the previous section, Juliet doesn't often seem to die. Rather, she just stops posting status updates on her timeline, sometimes around the point at which Romeo or she dies, but also sometimes in medias res, leaving her story tantalizingly incomplete. Yet, at other times, Juliet lives on, posting about herself living her life. Usually, her activity is low-key, an

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Figure 13. Capulet Juliet [3]'s Timeline She writes, "it killed me inside . . . but I know what i did was for the best. . ." and "i needed to end it before it killed what we have . . . i owe alot to Romeo and will remember him always and forever" ("Capulet Juliet [3]" 2010), provocatively suggesting that she dumped Romeo, leaving him to his own devices, perhaps even to kill himself in grief over his loss. Whatever the truth of Romeo and Juliet's situation may be, this particular Juliet went on to graduate from high school and, for all we know, live happily ever after. In this, there is (as in so many of her sisters' lives) an evanescent quality: we can't know (at least from her Wall, or at least from this Wall) what happened to Juliet. And yet, this ephemerality vibrates in tension with the temporary permanence of the Wall itself: there it sits, testament to Juliet's existence . . . as long as the account holder or Facebook suffers it to live. And then, poof: this Juliet will be gone, almost for good, remaining only in traces of personal memories and second-party documentation.

This temporary permanence, in combination with the open-endedness of the character's life, seems to be one of the distinguishing features of Facebook Juliet, and perhaps of social media Shakespeare overall. Theatrical performance is similarly fleeting. Once an individual performance is over, it's gone, left only in memory and memorial reconstructions such as reviews, blog posts, critical analyses, and so on — part of what Barbara Hodgdon calls "a www.borrowers.uga.edu/783190/show 21/42 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation kind of present historicism" (1989) — or in recordings (which can only partially document a theatrical event). Film and television productions of Shakespeare, while more permanent in that they are most often recorded and (in theory) infinitely repeatable on playback, also possess an element of transience. A notable example of this transience is David Thacker's production of Measure for Measure for the BBC's Performance series. Airing in November 1994 on BBC2, the production has never been commercially available for purchase in the U.S. People remember having seen it, or remember wishing they had seen it, but actual copies of the broadcast are tough to get: it seems to circulate primarily in grainy dubs, VHS recordings of on-air broadcasts, or even copies of copies. (This is in contrast to productions such as The Hollow Crown: although U.S. residents had to wait, more or less patiently, while friends and colleagues across the Atlantic teased about seeing the production when it aired in July 2012 — or gloated about owning a region 2 DVD, released in November 2012, some eleven months before the U.S. release — the eventual PBS broadcast and region 1 DVD release in fall 2013 ensured ready and repeatable access to the production, to say nothing of the wealth of interviews and clips available online.) For all of the vast technological and monetary resources at even the average critic's disposal, broadcasts can be missed, recordings can be damaged or deleted, and even if the recorded production is recoverable (or re-purchasable), the unique experience of the original viewing is irretrievable. Despite what the ads say, a Shakespeare production can't be "seen again for the first time." However, what makes social media incarnations like Capulet Juliet [3] qualitatively distinct from the Juliets in any of the theatrical, film, and TV productions of Romeo and Juliet is the social media Juliet's continuing existence. In the playhouse, cinema, and living room, Juliet is done. She is ended. On Facebook, she lives on.18

Perhaps even more profound than the restructuring of Juliet's life is the change Facebook Juliet has wrought upon Shakespeare's Juliet's language. In Spectral Shakespeares, Maurizio Calbi devotes extensive space to the consideration of Shakespeare's language "and the collateral effects — some would say damages" of a variety of twenty-first- century media adaptations on that language, including the possibility of "the marginalization of the Shakespearean word" (2013, 8). His study ranges across "loose adaptations" (7), translation into other languages and misquoting (10, 82, 90), the "accurate reproduction of Shakespeare's lines" in performance (102), and the absence of Shakespeare's language in Shakespeare performances (153). All of these categories apply to the Facebook Juliets' language(s), but it is on Calbi's notes on translation that I wish to focus: translation into another language "draws attention to translation, and the translation of Shakespeare in particular, as an unfinished process, a process that does not necessarily reach its aim or destination" (10; see also 82), nor "necessarily guarantee[s] a safe return back 'home' in terms of adequation or restitution of meaning" (90). Although writing here of translation, Calbi's comments can be usefully applied to other forms of linguistic adaptation, including summary, paraphrase, almost- right quotations, even extra-textual additions, all acts that the Facebook Juliets perform. Considering those actions that the Facebook Juliets perform with (on? to?) Shakespeare's language can help us (1) to see that these various speech acts might not be "casual" but might rather be "strateg[ies]" (Calbi 2013, 154), and (2) to see what seems to be a reconfiguring of Juliet's entire relationship with the world.

Leisha Jones describes "twenty-first century networked girls" and their online activity as "a Jamesonian pastiche of narrative" (2011, 448). This certainly may apply to some of the Facebook Juliets; however, I am not certain that the matter is as uniform as Jones suggests. "Jamesonian" implies a negative critique about "complacent eclecticism" in which the subject "randomly and without principle but with gusto cannibalizes" source materials "and combines them in overstimulating ensembles" (Jameson 1991, 18 and 19). That may be true of some of the individual Facebook Juliet accounts and Pages, but it is hard to say whether posts such as Parisa Juliet's "Oh Romeo, have you left this world without me? nay, i shall joineth you . . . we shall part from this world together" are complacent, unreflective eclectic moosh or self-aware, reflexive gestures. Put another way, some critics may want to celebrate someone like Joss Whedon for knowing parodies: THOR You have no idea what you're dealing with. TONY STARK/IRON MAN (considering the woods around him and Thor's outfit) Uh, Shakespeare in the Park? Doth mother know you weareth her drapes? (The Avengers 2012) Yet, it may be more difficult to consider the possibility that the (probably) female producers of Facebook Juliet are having similar fun with Shakespearean language, making deliberate, parodic, perhaps even "belligerent" (Calbi 2013, www.borrowers.uga.edu/783190/show 22/42 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 156) or antagonistic moves to challenge or subvert the authority of their assignments, their teachers, the playtext, Shakespeare, "correctness," or even language itself.19 (Further, such deliberate moves as reconceiving Juliet as Indian (see figure 8), to say nothing of the other racial and religious remakings we have seen, hardly seem random and without principle.)20

To my specific point, in the playtext, Juliet's utterances fall into three groups: those that are shared, those that she thinks are private but that are overheard, and those that are truly private. For example, a comment shared with her parents and nurse, as well as any eavesdropping servants (or any servants who chance to overhear what could be a very loud fight), would be "Good father, I beseech you on my knees, / Hear me with patience but to speak a word" (Romeo and Juliet 3.5.158-59); a private comment that is overhead is "Romeo, doff thy name, / And for thy name, which is no part of thee, / Take all myself" (2.2.47-49); and truly private comments can be found in her soliloquies "Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds" (3.2.1-31), "Ancient damnation! O most wicked fiend! (3.5.236-43), and "I have a faint cold fear runs through my veins" (4.3.15-58). Speech acts such as these can, and do, shift on Facebook. Now, Juliet's public utterances, which were formerly shared with only a few people, have gone global: a comment formerly shared just with her mother and her nurse — "I'll look to like, if looking like move" — is now subject to public scrutiny ("Juliet Capulet [7]" 2010). (A related example of such "publicizing" can be found in Such Tweet Sorrow, the 2010 social-media performance of Romeo and Juliet. As part of that performance, Juliet posted a YouTube video in which she shows the "couple of places" where she had sex with Romeo, up against the wall of her bedroom and "a lot of times" in the bed ([94Juliet] 2010). The next stage in this process, I suppose, is for some Capulet servant to record an iPhone video of Juliet fighting with her parents and then post it on Tumblr or a Kim Kardashianesque "leaked" homemade sex tape of Romeo and Juliet's first night.) Similarly, Juliet's semi-private utterances have become public, shared, and not just with her family but with everyone. Her My only love sprung from my only hate, Too early seen unknown, and known too late! Prodigious birth of love it is to me That I must love a loathed enemy. (Romeo and Juliet 1.5.136-39) previously only partially overheard by her nurse, is now overheard by everyone ("Juliet Capulet [9]"), as is her formerly entirely private "What if this mixture do not work at all? Shall I be married then tomorrow morning?" (Romeo and Juliet 4.3.21-22; see "Juliet Capulet [15]" 2011). And some formerly public declarations have almost certainly become private. See, for instance, figure 9, which documents the public face that Juliet Capulet [4] presents to the world. Who knows what she says there: it is unavailable to anyone not her friend, though perhaps within that account the audience(s) for her comments may be altered as well — things said only to mom, dad, and nurse may now be available to all of Juliet's network and not just her immediate family. While she remains Shakespeare's secluded teenager whose desperation is little noted by the world, she is also changed from a private individual who only speaks to five people (her father, mother, nurse, Romeo, and the Friar) to one who airs out her anxieties and delights in public: no longer cloistered in her parents' home, now Juliet is "always on" (boyd 2012, 71-72). Everything that she thinks, says, and does is on display 24/7/365. This has the immediate effect of expanding the reach of the Shakespearean playtext, but more profoundly, in this we are seeing new ways of "staging" Juliet as well as a displacement of the "original" character by the "staging" of a new, online Juliet.

A DIGITAL COLLECTIVE JULIET? Questions of the negotiation and construction of identity online are common in studies of social media, along with studies of how one might usefully, if not properly, describe and assess users' online activity. Investigations range from "performances of an online self" (Westlake 2008, 32; see also Gershon 2011, 867; Iyengar and Desmet 2012; Jones 2011, 439; O'Neill 2011; Zhao et al. 2008) — including the ways in which users represent themselves differently not just for different audiences but also depending on which type of technological device they use to link to social media and to construct that identity (Matic 2011, 19 and 13-14; Livingstone 2008, 6-8; see also Gershon 2011, 867; Iyengar and Desmet 2012; Jones 2011, 439; O'Neill 2011; Zhao et al. 2008, 1820-21) — to the ways in which different representations of the self can be rewarding (Matic 2011, 19; see also boyd 2012, 73-74; McBride and Hall 2012, 13-14, as well as Gershon 2011, 888; Ito et al. 2010, 138-45) or troubling to assumptions about the nature of literary genres (McNeill 2012, 65). Other fields of inquiry center on the impact of social media on individuals' psychology, identity and values (Panek et al. 2013; Voolaid 2013, 77 and 93), on how online www.borrowers.uga.edu/783190/show 23/42 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation collaboration contributes to the construction of group identity (Hyde et al 2012, 59-60), and on how social media impacts an individual's socialization (Tufecki 2008, 547-50 and 556-57; Ito et al. 2010, passim but especially 79-115 and 149-94). With such a range of critical activity, it should come as no surprise that consensus is hard to find, though the general attitude of all of these critics is that we are seeing a new kind of "'person production'" going on, that the performance of the online self tends to but need not parallel the users' actual self, and that users tend to find some sort of "benefit from self-representation online" (Matic 2011, 19; see also boyd 2012, passim), though this latter is hardly unqualified (as Gershon 2011, Lovink 2011 and Panek et al. 2013 make clear).

With regard to Facebook Juliet, two things seem to be happening: Facebook users are performing Juliet online, in a manner not unlike that which an actor might employ, and as a result of all of this online activity, the unitary subject Juliet is undergoing a transformation to what Leisha Jones calls the "digital collective subject" (2011, 448). As noted above, Jones describes the ways in which "twenty-first century networked girls" "enculture and produce one another, actualizing one or any number of selves online" (2011, 441, 439) through their activity on social networking sites, calling the result of this activity "a Jamesonian pastiche of narrative — images, sound, film, statistics, advertisements, text grafts, and self-authored prose — functionally obliterating the boundaries of the self/text" (448). As Jones describes the process, "the digital collective subject arises from the simultaneity of pack production" (448). Unlike the "pack production" that a tail-end-boomer like myself might assume — a group of individuals working on producing something, like line workers assembling a car or a team of college employees collaboratively writing a North Central Association re-accreditation report — Jones provides an example of the "pack" as the legion of Twilight fans that "explores, dissects and creates meaning around revered cultural objects, institutions, and events" (2011, 454), in particular, fangirls who extend Stephanie Myers' characters in ways that they find more satisfying than the textual traces that the characters' creator left them (457).

Having already voiced an objection to her characterization, I would now also extend it: in the case of Facebook Juliet, rather than the collective subject being produced by a single individual's activity across a variety of platforms — for example, the individual Juliet C "actualizes" herself through activity on both Facebook and Twitter (see "Juliet's Liszt" 2013) — the collective subject is being produced by a horde of individuals on a single site. In this sense, rather than a disaggregated thousand little Juliets, we find a hyperreal Juliet constituted by the horde's thousands of ideas of the character, a shared Juliet that — who? — is constantly changing, always in process, subtly evolving with each Like, Share, Friend acceptance, status update, account creation or Page deletion.

In an essay on fan culture and fans' interactions with George Lucas's Star Wars franchise, Henry' Jenkins broadly describes fan fiction, or fiction created by fans of an original work (here, Star Wars, but by extension any original, such as Harry Potter, Twilight, or Romeo and Juliet), as works in which the fans "remake it [the original] on their own terms" (2012, 203).21 Fan fiction can take many forms (traditional print or online text, YouTube videos, professional films, musical mash-ups, and so on), but the features common to all forms of fan fiction are its approach and its tone: fan fiction "draw[s] out aspects of the emotional lives of the characters or otherwise get[s] inside their heads . . . explore[s] underdeveloped subtexts of the original . . . offer[s] original interpretations of the story, or suggest[s] plotlines that go beyond the work itself" (224); fan fiction is relationship-based, involving "closer identification with the characters, and hint[ing] at aspects of . . . relationship[s] that have not explicitly been represented" in the original work (225). Jenkins is explicit in noting that fan fiction "is almost entirely produced by women" (224). And here we see our Facebook Juliets. Although it is not always clear that these accounts and pages were made and are maintained by women, there are clear individual moves to "remake" the original, "draw out aspects of the emotional lives of the characters" and "get inside" Juliet's head, as well as to "suggest plotlines that go beyond the work itself." We see more of what Juliet thinks about her new relationship with Romeo, we are given direct access to her thinking about her mother's suggestion of Paris as a suitor, and we meet a Juliet who dumps Romeo and goes on to graduate from high school. Much of this activity is similar to what an actor might engage in while preparing for a performance: the actor playing Juliet would need to know not just when, where, how, and how often Juliet has sex with Romeo but also how Juliet feels about her first sexual encounter(s) after the fact, for instance. On Facebook, what is different from such a traditional performance technique is that the audience is given access to this information, rather than just the actor and director. These online performances give us new access to the "background" of a character as well as access to new ideas about the character. And what is distinctive about the social media aspect of Facebook Juliet is that we also get a new way of conceiving of the character, not one "developed" by the individual, but one produced by the pack. www.borrowers.uga.edu/783190/show 24/42 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Pack production is an effect of the process called prosumption. As the Prosumer Studies Working Group at the University of Maryland puts it, "prosumption is the implosion of the spheres of production and consumption. This trend has become particularly important with social media, where users tend to be both the producers and consumers of content" ("about us" n.d.).22 As David R. Zemmels notes, this "breakdown in the producer/consumer dialectic that had remained relatively consistent throughout the prior history of mass media" is particularly sharp in teens, where we are seeing "a fundamental shift in the basic relationship between media and youth" (2012, 10): "the very nature of the media consumer appears to be changing. Rather than a passive consumer of media, the user is actively engaging media. Key to this conception is recognizing that participants are also becoming active consumers of new media and distributing them in global networked publics" (17). Some examples of prosumption that the Prosumer Studies Working Group provides are The consumers of knowledge online can increasingly be the producers as is the case with Wikipedia or Google's Knol; On eBay and Craigslist, the consumers rather than retailers create the market; and on Amazon, the consumers produce the reviews; Linux, a free, collaboratively-built open-source operating system, and other open-source software applications are created and maintained by those who use them; Mozilla Firefox, Thunderbird, and Sunbird are open source internet browser, email client, and calendar applications, where, users contribute add-ons to modify the applications, which are often incorporated in later releases; Yelp!, FourSquare and others services where city guides are created by those that consume them; R is an open source statistical software package which evolves through user contributions; Allrecipes.com is one of many sites where the consumers are also the producers of the recipes; Many algorithms, most notably that of the Google search engine, are fed by the myriad data users create by their activities online. ("about us" n.d.; see also Ritzer and Jurgenson 2010, 18-19) The prosumer, or producer/consumer, "ingests signs and also emits them as a single gesture" (Jones 2011, 450). In other words, the creators of these Juliet Pages and accounts are simultaneously consuming the idea of Shakespeare's Juliet and creating Juliet through their interactions with Facebook.23 They do this individually and as a pack, independently collaborating on a shared project that they are probably unaware they are involved in. As odd as this idea of "independent collaboration" may seem, it is not unheard of in social media theory. Attempting to define collaboration in online environments in "What is Collaboration Anyway?," Adam Hyde et al. argue that "The intensity of these relationships . . . [sits] somewhere on a continuum from strong ties with shared intentionality to incidental production by strangers through shared interfaces or agents, sometimes unconscious byproducts of other online activity" (2012, 60). In this instance, Facebook Juliet is a result of what Hyde and his collaborators call "incidental production," though when people within individual Juliet accounts contribute to the production of that particular Juliet though likes, comments and friending, the collaboration becomes "strong . . . with shared intentionality" (60). However, when it comes to the cyber entity Facebook Juliet, the pack's participants seem neither to know nor care that they apparently are engaged in the energetic deconstruction of the idea of the social subject Juliet through their creation of a constellation of Juliets and the "digital collective subject" Juliet.

Laurie McNeill notes that Facebook's design "for ease of use" has the effect of "regularizing" identity, even of "promot[ing] particular homogenizing impulses" (2012, 70), and since one can certainly see "regularized" aspects of Facebook Juliet's identity, it is tempting to say that she is at least somewhat homogenized. This concept of homogenization is problematic, though. It is not accurate on two counts, at least in these circumstances: as a concept borrowed from cultural studies, because few of the Facebook Juliets are what Scott Lash and Celia Lury describe as "identical to any other" (2007, 3), and as a metaphor, because there is no one perfectly blended Juliet. However, the multiplicity of irreconcilable Juliets clearly challenges any notion of Juliet as a single, singular individual, despite definite elements of coherency in the multitude. Individually, Facebook Juliet is often frustratingly incomplete (much as is Shakespeare, the concept of "Shakespeare" existing as it does as fragments within the larger culture): a few pictures, a quote or three, maybe a couple of posts in slangy idiom. This incompletion is an essential aspect of Facebook itself, as Ilana Gershon explains: "Facebook . . . provides the conditions for presenting tantalizing, incomplete information" (2011, 867; see also Matic 2011 19), "enough information [for users] to be curious, and keep searching, but not enough information to be satisfied" (Gershon 2011, 888). However, despite this aggravation (on the negative romantic effects of which, see Gershon 2011 passim, Facebook Juliet is also bafflingly overcomplete, overflowing with contradictory signs, an early twenty-first century www.borrowers.uga.edu/783190/show 25/42 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation digitized iteration of "My bounty is as boundless as the sea, / My love as deep; the more I give to thee, / The more I have, for both are infinite" (2.2.134-35). This sense of superfluity is also endemic to Facebook. Gershon notes users' frustration with their "feel[ing that] the site provides both too much information and not enough data" (2011, 867), though two important caveats apply here. Gershon is discussing the feelings of individuals who are monitoring their romantic partners' Facebook activity and worrying about possible infidelity, and this excess refers to single individuals' accounts, rather than thousands of pages devoted to documenting the life of an individual.

Pack production of the digital collective subject is not the only way in which identity is being reframed on Facebook. In addition to the horde's active creation of Facebook Juliet, there are multiple individuals who are using Juliet to produce themselves. There are eleven that I have looked at so far: Farzana Toro (Juliet Capulet); Ezgi C. Capulet (MertKültür Herseyim); Randhika Capulet; Parisa Juliet (Capulet); Juliet Rose Capulet-Halliwell; Juliet Castillos-Castromayor Capulet-Montague; Juliet Capulet [10], [11], and [19]; Juliet C; and Juliet Anne Capulet. Of these, two appear to be heavily fictionalized cyber personalities, Juliet Anne Capulet and Julie Rose Capulet- Halliwell. Juliet Rose's profile shots include images of Monique Gibeau, Ellen Page, Selena Gomez, and Lindsay Lohan, while Juliet Anne Capulet's stress Halee Steinfeld, with some Emmy Rossum thrown in. The URL for Juliet Anne's profile indicates that the account is held by a person named Skylar Perro, but a Facebook search for that name turns up only one active account with heavy privacy settings: unless I ask her to friend me (and she accepts), there's little to be seen there. Juliet Anne numbers among her friends Kim Capulet, Daniel Cullen, Harry James [Potter], and Hermione Granger, and she also appears to be heavily invested in the Twilight and Vampire Diaries franchises: her interest in Romeo and Juliet is relatively recent, possibly influenced by the 2013 film starring Halee Steinfeld and Douglas Booth. For her part, Juliet Rose is friends with Katniss LovesPeeta Everdeen (from the Hunger Games novels), Elliot Stabler (from TV's Law and Order: Special Victims Unit), Richerd Castle [sic] (from TV's Castle), Nikki Carter (a prolific young-adult fiction author) and Kylie Williams (a beauty queen, reality TV star, and veterans' affairs advocate). Some of these accounts are similar to the various Juliets', tracking the in-universe lives of fictional characters, but others — including Juliet Rose's and a good many of her friends' — are people whose cyberselves are complex blends of real life events, fictionalized real life, and role play, all of which are rendered with visuals and themes borrowed from across the web and throughout literature. Whereas the thematic relevances for Juliet Anne seem clear — young, doomed lovers — the significance of Juliet to Juliet Rose is much less so. There are no particularly Julietish posts on her timeline, and the sense I have from exploring her and her friends' timelines is that the names are part of an elaborate network of online role players whose members' play includes rapidly shifting names and identities, as evidenced by the following series of posts from Amy TimeSlut-Pond's newsfeed: "Another 30 day block? Seriously . . . is this a fucking joke!?!?!" (2013); "I guess its time for a new account. Who should I base my new dom on then? Anyone can offer an idea if they like"; and "Ok I'm abandoning this account add Hayley Williams if you want to dominate you, or Luna Pond if you want to dominate me!" As for the remaining Juliets, only one has an obvious connection with Shakespeare's Juliet: Parisa Juliet (Capulet). Regarding the others, there are no obvious connections to Juliet, no pictures, posts, quotes or likes, at least that I have found. Nor is there anything in their various accounts that suggests to me why these women would have chosen to self-identify with an isolated, temperamental and dead fictional teenager from a Renaissance tragedy, as none of them seems to be especially invested in sorrow, romance, tragedy, familial dysfunction, or disrupting the body politic with feuding. (That's not to say that they're not: Facebook feeds, as discussed above, only ever reveal the account holders's lives partially.) The point of identification could be with Juliet's youth, beauty, and innocence, or it could be with Juliet as a character who defies authority in favor of self-determination, but in point of fact much more research is needed in this area.

That research would include a third aspect of Facebook Juliet, alluded to multiple times already but not yet discussed: the use of famous (and some not-so-famous) individuals' faces and bodies to represent Juliet and sometimes the account holders themselves, including this phenomenon's prevalence in fan culture, perhaps along with precedent activities and practices such as collage and home-made magazines. Using the ubiquitous Claire Danes and Olivia Hussey makes sense, and I suspect that Halee Steinfeld will become more common in the future (through her film's lack of commercial success makes this a somewhat iffy proposition). I have already discussed the fact of the actors' and models' physical beauty; the issue to be raised here is another wrinkle in the identity question. Even as Juliet is being reconfigured by the various account builders, and even as some account holders are reconfiguring themselves as Juliet, many of the Facebook profiles surveyed here are reconfiguring others as Juliet, www.borrowers.uga.edu/783190/show 26/42 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation and they are doing so (I presume) without those individuals' knowledge or consent. In some cases, the use of celebrity is explicitly emblematic, as with "Juliet," who uses Michelle Trachtenberg for her profile picture because "This picture shows a woman with long dark hair and fair skin. She reminds me of an elegant lady in the elizabethan era." In other cases, such as Juliet Capulet [19]'s profile shot of Princess Diana, the image is more laden with symbolism, here clearly of tragedy but also suggesting youth and divided families. Others' physiognomies are more cryptic — such Juliet Capulet [21]'s use of Julia Allison, a journalist who is about as well-known for being a self- promoting Internet presence as she is for her journalism — though the reasons behind most would seem to fall into one of the following three categories: (a) some affinity the account builder has for the celebrity, liking her style, her acting, her singing, her political commitments; (b) the account builder is making a political comment, configuring Juliet as Black or Jewish, for instance; or (c) convenience — I need a pretty girl for this dumb homework assignment — as seems to be the case with "July Capulet (Juliet)," whose profile pic shows up all over the web, on hairstyle and hair salon sites. All of this activity, the reconfiguring of Juliet, the remaking of the account holders using Juliet, and the remaking of others as Juliet — it's not just that Juliet looks like Megan Fox, but that Megan Fox has Julietish characteristics — certainly fits with the Jamesonian notion of pastiche, the cannibalizing of apparently unrelated images which gradually efface the referent (1991, 18), but this activity also supports the idea of identity as performance, fluid and almost infinitely reconfigurable. Not only can you be who you want to be, be all that you can be, but you can be who others want you to be, whether you like it or not.

WE SHALL KNOW HER BY HER NAME, SHALL WE? OR, JULIET, I PROSUME? Ironically, all of this reconfiguration of identity flies in the face of pronouncements from on high by Facebook's founder Mark Zuckerberg and the company's Chief Operations Officer (COO) Sheryl Sandberg, who assert that individual people can only have one identity on Facebook, that on Facebook you have to be "'your authentic self'" (McNeill 2012, 68): in the words of the site itself, "Facebook requires everyone to provide their real names so you always know who you're connecting with. If you'd like your account to show another name you're known by, you can add an alternate name to your account," such as a nickname, a "title or professional name" or maiden name. But "Remember that your alternate name must comply with our Community Standards": it cannot "Contain hate speech or offensive language," "Target another individual or group," "Be used to represent any business, organization, group etc.," or "Be used to impersonate someone else" ("What alternate" 2013). Elsewhere on the site, Facebook asserts that it "is a community where people use their real identities. We require everyone to provide their real names, so you always know who you're connecting with. This helps keep our community safe" ("What names" 2013). In other words, "Pretending to be anything or anyone is not allowed" ("What names" 2013). This is a lovely fiction, belied by the fact that it is absurdly easy to create new selves and fake profiles on Facebook.24 If there is a real Juliet out there, she's been very busy indeed, hiving off accounts and Pages at an impressive clip, but since there isn't one, someone has been breaking the rules. Or more to the point, many someones have been breaking the rules. More profound problems erupt if Zuckerberg and Sandberg are right, if you cannot have two identities, or if one of your identities is inauthentic: since she has a personal account, does that mean that Juliet is authentic? More or less authentic than her Facebook creator(s)? (And if the self behind Juliet's Facebook page isn't Shakespeare, what does that mean for Shakespeare's authenticity?) If Juliet is authentic, then what does her authenticity suggest about her Facebook creator(s)? Are they then inauthentic, their identities supplanted by Juliet's? Shakespeare's Juliet, who puzzles over the notion of identity with her "O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?" (2.2.33), hardly knew what a can of worms she was going to open up (with the help of some Friends) four centuries later. These questions dovetail almost elegantly with those that have preoccupied Shakespeare performance studies for quite some time now, in particular the question of authenticity. While Calbi makes clear that "the essential and authentic 'Shakespeare' resides in the language of the plays" (2013, 143), he also indicates doubts about "the 'truth' of the 'original' playtext" (102) and of "Shakespeare" through those telling little scare quotes. Other critics such as Ayanna Thompson, Margaret Jane Kidnie, Wendy Wall, and W. B. Worthen have also interrogated notions of authenticity. Thompson engages in questions of authenticity in race and performance (2011, 11 and 147-67). Kidnie challenges the privileging of the printed text rather than the performance as the "real" Shakespeare (2005, 103-105). Wall investigates the two quartos of Romeo and Juliet, both of which "possess 'independent authority'" and wonders "What exactly is the text to which performances and films should be faithful or not?" (2005, 198). Worthen calls into focus "textual multiplicity and materiality" and pointing out how these "draw attention away from the notion of the perdurable work identical in all of its manifestations and toward a sense of writing changing and being changed by the circumstances of its use: in other words, of the fungibility of the text that's intrinsic to the history of (early and www.borrowers.uga.edu/783190/show 27/42 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation late) modern theatre" (2005, 217). Without knowing she was doing it, Facebook Juliet has entered into questions central to the study of Shakespeare in performance.

Debates over authenticity are by no means restricted to Shakespeare performance studies. In Networks without a Cause, Geert Lovink fulminates at length about the threats he sees in Facebook and what the site's structure suggests about how we have come to conceive of the self. He discounts as concerns "the time consumed by managing my nearly 2000 'friends,' or the privacy concerns" as reasons for leaving Facebook on an "action day" on 31 May 2010 (though neither of these is inconsiderable); rather, the worry he privileges is the growing role of centralized internet services offered to us at no cost in exchange for collecting our data, profiles, music tastes, social behaviors, and opinions. It is not simply that we have something to hide. Let's hope we all do. What we need to defend is the very principle of decentralized, distributed networks. This principle is under attack by corporations such as Google and Facebook, as well as by national authorities who feel a need to control our communication and the data infrastructure at large. (2011, 31) This is a real concern. Yet, however sinister Facebook's corporate machinations may be, what really bothers Lovink is that "Facebook in particular has spurred an identity crisis of yet unknown dimensions, circling around the question of who we are and how we should present ourselves online" (2011, 38). Largely unsupported by actual examples, Lovink argues that "we're not looking to externalize other possible selves but the True Self, deep inside" (38), a desire that he describes as "pathological" (40), in part because "there is no one, true Self that we must absolutely unveil" (43), and since "there is no one being . . . we should ask why we still need to perform a synthesis" of all of our selves (44). Though aspects of his argument are worth considering — "Social networking is not about affirming something as truth but more about making truth through endless clicking" (44), and we should not accept "the idea of the true self, advocated by Facebook as our one and only option" (49) — I am not convinced that his apocalyptic worry over identity is supported by what I see happening with Facebook Juliet. Certainly there is an abundance of self-disclosure in the Juliet pages, both of Juliet and of the individuals who are using Juliet to reconfigure themselves, but in these various performative acts I do not see much that I would describe as pathological, and I do see evidence of exactly what Lovink calls for as a corrective to whatever evils Facebook may be foisting upon the world: "anonymity . . . self-performance and creative play" (2011, 49). Facebook might not like it, but there are a lot of anonymous individuals out there, each one performing as Juliet. And there is abundant evidence of self-performance and creative play in those account holders who appropriate Juliet and celebrities as a means of reconfiguring or augmenting their cyber selves.

Lovink's worries, repeatedly made explicit, are implicitly shared by Gershon in her discussion of college students' Facebook-inspired romantic travails. Gershon describes the phenomenon as an expression of "a U.S. neoliberal perspective," which "demands selves that consciously bring a market rationality to their relations. Facebook is a medium that urges, but does not determine, the creation and display of these sorts of selves" by asking "its users to manage themselves as flexible collections of skills, usable traits, and tastes that need to be constantly maintained and enhanced." Gershon describes this as "a quintessential element of the neoliberal self, that people are 'a collection of assets that must be continually invested in, nurtured, managed, and developed'" (2011, 867). Although she never makes her disapproval explicit, it lingers around the margins of her essay. Because collegiate Facebook users have adopted the "neoliberal" bias of Facebook hook, line, and sinker, and because that neoliberal bias reduces the individual to "'a collection of assets'" rather than what Lovink calls the "True Self," and because adopting Facebook's bias has made them miserable, and since they were happier after leaving Facebook, then Facebook is at least misery-inducing, if not miserable altogether. Unfortunately, not all Facebook users see the matters of identity or happiness as being as clear as Lovink draws it and as Gershon suggests it to be. Igor Matic's study of Internet users finds that these "users tend to construct their online identity based on the technology being used (cell phone, personal computer, office or school computer/network) and with [sic] the social environment that surrounds the given online communication tool" (2011, 13-14); not only that, but "users do not represent themselves in accordance with their expectations from the Internet communication but in accordance with audience expectations" (19). Users develop content with their audiences in mind and with the specificities of the platform — "the social environment" — in mind and acknowledge "that they benefit from different self-representations online and that they have their own patterns of behavior that changes [sic] in accordance with the given communication exchange on the Internet" (19). Matic specifically references one user as an example: the latter "is well aware of the www.borrowers.uga.edu/783190/show 28/42 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation audience that visits the given gossip page online [that she likes] and that she reacts differently when she assumes the role of an anonymous commentator of the daily events" (2011, 19). In other words, "users actively define their self- representation and willingly choose which 'role' to play," knowing "that there is no need to reveal their identity every time they are online" (19). Margaret A. Berg, investigating adolescents' online text use in conversation, parallels Matic's findings: some social media users define the "physical being as separate from [the] cyberspace being" (2011, 490), and they see this, if not as a good thing, then certainly as a thing not as problematic as Gershon suggests or Lovink asserts. (Ayanna Thompson notes a possible benefit of fluid online identity: "not only is Generation M actively engaged in employing and keeping 'salient' racial discourses, but also this occurs more online than it does offline . . . the Internet may actually push racial discourses to the fore more than offline interactions do" [2011, 151].) The thousands of personal accounts and Pages that make up Facebook Juliet, along with the individuals who use Juliet and other celebrities to perform themselves, are engaged in a complex network of acts of negotiation and resistance not just with Shakespeare but with what culture traditionally suggests is the self — a single, unitary individual.

"Person production," Spencer E. Cahill argues, "clearly occurs through mediated, disembodied forms of interaction as well [as face-to-face interactions], and probably increasingly so" (quoted in Westlake 2008, 27). We perform and produce ourselves through direct interactions as well as indirect ones . . . and there is nothing especially new about this process. Shakespeare "produced" himself through various forays into spelling his own name, through legal documents, and through his creative works; I produce and perform myself through annual Christmas letters to friends and family I may not have seen in person for years, as well as through scholarly writing, notes on student papers, Facebook status updates, Tweets, text messages with my wife, and face-to-face "discussions" with her about where to go to eat when we're both too lazy to cook on Friday night. Beyond this thought, even, is the possibility that "mass media [. . .] no longer just represent[s] reality, but constitut[es] it" (Zemmels 2012, 6), a possibility made specific by Gershon's exploration of the impact of Facebook on college students' romantic lives. If mass media — like Facebook — constitute reality, and if person production "occurs through mediated, disembodied forms of interaction" (2011), what does that mean for our fair Juliet?

It would be easy to write off Facebook Juliet as superficial, malodorous, as a debasement of SHAKESPEARE — too easy, in fact. While some individual Juliets on Facebook may be phoned-in, disengaged, or just plain silly, even their silliness reveals individual account holders who are engaged in some way with Shakespeare and reveals how those account holders have come to understand him and his works, even if that understanding is, in effect, "ugh get lost #canyounot." As a group, the account holders and Page makers reveal a desire to make Juliet proximate in their lives; they expose part of the turbulent workings of fan culture; and they participate in the struggles over the nature, role, and extent of social media in our lives today, to say nothing of struggles with and over Shakespeare, Shakespeare's playtexts, and Shakespeare's language that generations of casual readers and professional scholars alike have engaged in. Through their energetic reconfigurations — of Juliet, of Shakespeare, of themselves, of others — they likewise participate in Romeo and Juliet's long history of remakings, extending here in the twenty-first century to perhaps the most significant reconfiguration of all, what it means to be an autonomous, authentic individual.

Whatever it is that Facebook Juliet is, she is certainly engaged in "'public living'" (Zemmels 2012, 16): she is more in the world now than perhaps she ever was. If "[i]n new media spaces, the construction of identity is now understood as overlapping and competing interpellations existing simultaneously at interconnected nodal points [. . .] where 'networked individuals' are constituted within 'networked publics'" (Zemmels 2012, 17; see also Matic 2011, 19), then through these intersecting processes of negotiation, resistance and prosumption, we may be seeing a new way to see Juliet, maybe even an altogether new Juliet aborning, right beneath our fingers, even as we "speak."

APPENDIX 1. TRANSCRIBED ROMEO AND JULIET FACEBOOK PAGE ASSIGNMENT FOR MIDDLE SCHOOL LANGUAGE ARTS STUDENTS Romeo and Juliet

Facebook page

www.borrowers.uga.edu/783190/show 29/42 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation So, inspired by our love for social networking and Ophelia Joined the Group Maidens Who Don't Float by Sarah Schmelling, we are going to create a profile page for one of the main characters in Romeo and Juliet. Of course, I want you to use your knowledge of the characters and his/her traits, famous quotes, character development, etc. to complete the profile. Any information you cannot gather from the play, such as birthdays, you may complete using your own creativity. I will create a template and save it in my teacher share folder. Go to teacher share, open the template, save it on your z drive, and be creative!! I would also like to see a rough draft before we go to the computer lab. Rough draft is due: ______and final draft is due: ______.

Profile Basic Information______Networks: Birthday: Relationship Status: Personal Information Activities: Favorite Music: Favorite Movies: Interests: Favorite Quotations: Wall Use this space to post things your character might say, or to post comments from other characters in the play. You must have at least 20 posts/comments on your wall. REMEMBER: IF SOME OF YOUR POSTS ARE QUOTES, YOU NEED OT USE QUOTATION MARKS AND PAGE NUMBERS! You must use appropriate language, but you are allowed to use slang and abbreviations appropriate for the assignment (and providing you provide a key for your uncool English teacher in case she needs it!) :)

Points Points Required Element Possible Earned Name and basic Information [sic] is filled out and is accurate and creative. 10 Personal Information seems to fit in with character and way that the character is developed and 15 described throughout the play. Wall — has 20 posts from both your character and other important characters in the play 20 Posts reflect your knowledge of the character and the play itself. They can be funny, but they 40 MUST BE SCHOOL APPROPRIATE! You use at least 5 quotes or variations of quotes in your posts and explain them. 10 Facebook page is creative, humorous, and most importantly, reflects your knowledge of the 5 play! TOTAL 100

NOTES 1. For a detailed overview and analysis of Romeo and Juliet's textual origins, see Levenson 2000, 1-15 and Lehmann 2010, 3-33; especially interesting is Lehmann's exploration of the historical origins of the Montague-Capulet feud (2010, 4-7). 2. On Ophelia as an object of identification for girls and women alike, see also Iyengar and Desmet 2012.

www.borrowers.uga.edu/783190/show 30/42 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 3. Interest pages are something of a mystery. Generally consisting of a "profile" picture, text lifted from Wikipedia (with a hyperlink, in case one feels moved to edit the entry), and an "About" frame with some idiosyncratic content, there is little one can do with an Interest page besides read and "Like" it. They appear to be rare (in this case, two pages as opposed to hundreds in other categories), and Facebook's help function is unhelpful as to their nature, function, or how they originate — as is, in fact, the Web as a whole. When queried, my students, who know Facebook much better than I, differ in their opinions: one thought it likely that Interest Pages originate with Facebook itself, after a certain number of people create pages on a certain topic; others hypothesized that Interest pages are a subset of Pages in general. My thanks to Ana Gonzales-Limon, Casey Lamp, and Eric Dawdy for taking the time to explore this vexing issue and then discuss it with me. 4. A community Page "is a Page is about an organization, celebrity or topic that it doesn't officially represent" ("What is a community Page?" 2014). On the one hand, "the community category helps identify Pages that are just for fun and not official, such as Pages for businesses, bands or public figures" ("Why does" 2014). The community label can be removed "[i]f you're the authentic representative of the Page you manage or if your Page is unrelated to the official Page we've [Facebook] linked it to" ("My Page" 2014), though Facebook does not seem much invested in confirming the authenticity of the representative. Although the ways in which it uses language at times makes it seem otherwise, Facebook sees a "Page" as different from a personal account. For instance, I have a personal account where people can "friend" me (or I them). If I were to become sufficiently popular (5,000 friends, according to one report [Zeldman 2011]), I could "migrate" or "convert" my account to a Page, which is designed to "help businesses, organizations and brands share their stories and connect with people" ("Pages Basics" n.d.). Or I could more simply create a page (rather, a Page) for my public self and keep my private self to myself. Whichever route I take, at that point, no one can friend me anymore. I can only be "Like[d]." Revealingly, community pages are "just for fun," while Pages are emphatically not. The distinction between personal accounts and Pages for public figures, et cetera, as well as the misuse of Pages and "fake accounts," is apparently a touchy subject for Facebook: on this, see Kayatta 2012. A "public figure," on the other hand, is harder to define than community or community Page, if only because Facebook (and every other source I consulted) never actually defines the phrase. "Public figure" is a part of one of six options offered when creating a Page "to build a closer relationship with your audience and customers": "Local Business or Place," "Company, Organization or Institution," "Brand or Product," "Artist, Band or Public Figure," "Entertainment" and "Cause or Community." When asked to "choose a category" from a pull-down menu that becomes available when one clicks on the "Artist, Band or Public Figure" group, "Actor/Director," "Writer," "Artist," "Teacher" and "Monarch" are all listed as options, as are "Fictional Character" and "Public Figure" ("Create" n.d.). At the same time that I find it fascinating that Facebook considers "monarch" to be sufficiently in demand to make it one of twenty-four categories of public figure (or is willing to permit itself a small degree of whimsy on a site that otherwise tends to take itself very seriously), I admit to being disappointed that someone, somewhere did not designate Juliet Capulet as a monarch of his or her own volition. 5. These categories seem fluid in their relationships to each other. "Fictional Character," along with "Public Figure," "Actor/Director" and "Writer," are both distinct categories and sub-categories, as for instance of "Verona, Italy" or "London, United Kingdom." Similarly, a "Fictional Character" can be a community or a community Page, as can a "Public Figure." Verona, Italy can also be a community or community Page. 6. Those that cannot be friended can be either "Followed" or messaged. Both are functions of Facebook's privacy settings. For instance, I (or any user) can adjust these settings so that only "Friends of Friends" can attempt to friend me, rather than the public at large. In that instance, other users can "Follow" me: they still receive my posts in their news feed, but their posts never appear in my feed, nor can they post on my wall. 7. Oddly, alternate names that appear in the search results do not always appear on the actual pages: for instance, hits for Randhika Capulet (Juliet) and Marlina Ghani (Juliet Capulet) take me to pages titled only "Randhika Capulet" ("Randhika" 2013) and "Marlina Ghani" ("Marlina" 2013), respectively. 8. Via Capello, 23 is the address of il Sogno di Giulietta, a luxury relais in Verona, complete with Juliet's balcony and, in the evening, private access to her courtyard (see "il Sogno di Giulietta" 2008). 9. Soul Reaper is a reference to a race of beings in the manga series Bleach. To be a Soul Reaper, one must graduate from the Academy. As of December 18, 2013, there are 11 pages for Soul Reaper Academy on Facebook. 10. As an example of the prevalence of Danes and Hussey profile pictures, over half of the first 211 hits in the December 2013 "Find all people named 'juliet capulet'" search were of Clare Danes and Olivia Hussey (44 hits, or 20.8%, 67 hits, or 31.8%, respectively).

www.borrowers.uga.edu/783190/show 31/42 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11. Determining whether a Profile picture is of a "real" person, as opposed to a celebrity of some sort, turns out to be a good test of the depth of one's pop-culture knowledge. Mine came out at about 60%: many of the individuals I did not recognize were Bollywood performers, Internet personalities, singers and models. 12. The notion of "pretty" is a complicated and contested one, obviously. For a semiotically loaded sample, see the website http://www.whatispretty.com (http://www.whatispretty.com) (#Beyoncé 2014). 13. On the ways in which, and reasons for which, literary characters can be remade and refashioned, see Hulbert 2006, Iyengar and Desmet 2012, Jones 2011, and O'Neill 2011; see also Panek et al. 2013. On how social media sites can be used to remake and refashion the user (sometimes without the user's intention or appreciation), see for instance Birnbaum 2013, Gershon 2011, Jones 2011, McNeill 2012, and Thompson 2011, 145-76. 14. See, for example, Donaldson 1990, 145-88, and Burt 1990; Howard 1992, Smith 1992, and Traub 1992, 91-144; Goldberg 1994; Smith 1995 (esp. 63-64); Burt 1998, 29-75; Lehmann 2010 (especially 146-47, 153, 158-59 and 218-220); and Calbi 2013, 102-103. An important queer study of the Renaissance predates the oldest of these examples by almost a decade: see Alan Bray's Homosexuality in Renaissance England originally published in 1982. 15. On Juliet's sexuality, see Belsey 1997, 65-68; Jackson 2003, 18-19, 130-31, 142-44, 150-53, and 158-61; Levenson 2000, 17, 22. 26, 30; Loehlin 2002, 36, 48, 67, 71, 74-75; Roberts 1998, 48-53; and Weis 2012, 13-14. 16. In comparison, see Calbi 2013 for a discussion of the representation of Juliet's sexuality in the film Sud Side Stori (93) and in Such Tweet Sorrow, a 2010 multi-platform social media performance of Romeo and Juliet. See also 94Juliet's YouTube video "Juliet 1" (2010). See also such works of fan fiction as "Modern day Romeo and Juliet" (MindlessLove21 2014) and the sexually explicit "Sinful Deed" (Mi3staR 2010). 17. I was sort of sad when I found that this was a pre-set option, rather than something someone thought up on his or her own. (A bit of Facebook trivia: change your "Relationship Status" from "Married" to "In an Open Relationship" and the preposition automatically changes from "to" to "with." Helpful Facebook.) 18. A further step in this process would be to try to "friend" the Juliets to see what happens. On others' attempts to do this, see Iyengar and Desmet (2012, 64); for possible explanations as to the failure of these attempts, see boyd (2012, 75). On some of the ethical challenges facing online social media researchers, see Thompson (2011, 148- 49). See also Appendix 1. Transcribed Romeo and Juliet Facebook page assignment for Middle School Language Arts students 1, a sample Facebook Juliet project designed for Middle School Language Arts students (listed below this essay as a separate document). 19. Calbi offers a provocative reading of the way in which Shakespeare "lives on": "the status of Shakespeare [in the twenty-first century] is 'hauntological,' a furtive mode of inhabiting without properly residing that . . . blurs any clear-cut distinction 'between actual, effective presence and its other'" (2013, 4); in other words, it is a "ghost . . . that refuses to stay put" (100). His analysis ranges across "the increasingly digitized and globalized mediascape of the beginning of the twenty-first century" (2), including the impact of adaptation on our understandings of language, gender, race, culture, nationality, and identity and identification. On adaptations of Romeo and Juliet, see 81-98 and 137-62. Lehmann provides an extensive analysis of the "legac[ies]" (2010, 257) of Romeo and Juliet in popular culture, along with the ways in which the playtext itself functions as an afterlife of its own antecedent narratives (3-33). Hodgdon contains a wide-ranging discussion of "evoking the absent bodies of . . . Romeo and Juliet performance texts" (1989, 359), and Watson and Dickey explore the "cumulative culture of sexual aggression from which Juliet will have to extricate her love story" (2005, 127), in particular the "ancient specter of rape haunting this story" (154). 20. For a relevant counter-argument to Jameson's conception of postmodern pastiche, see Hutcheon 2002, 89-91. 21. On the agency of online Shakespeare producers, see Iyengar and Desmet 2012, 62, 70 and 72-74; and O'Neill 2011, passim. 22. Fans and fan culture are much studied but not always as specifically defined or described as one might wish. For a useful general overview of fans, see Markman and Overholt 2011, 67-69. For a seminal study in fan culture, see Jenkins 2013, an early iteration of which can be found in Jenkins 1998 (see esp. 87-90). 23. Axel Bruns defines this phenomenon as "produsage": "it highlights that within the communities which engage in the collaborative creation and extension of information and knowledge . . . the role of 'consumer' and even that of 'end user' have long disappeared, and the distinctions between producers and users of content have faded into comparative insignificance" (2008, 2). On the related but broader concept of participation and participatory culture, see Jenkins 2006, 3 and Jenkins 2012, 205.

www.borrowers.uga.edu/783190/show 32/42 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 24. Metaphors to be sure, but using words with the root "consume" in these contexts make me feel squirmy: the mercantile overtones are not pleasing, nor is the words' sense of ingesting something. At their mildest, they imply a degree of disassociation, rather than a more participatory sense of theatre, films, books, even Facebook, where I cannot say I'd ever thought of myself as consuming my Friends before beginning this project.

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Peeking Behind the Digital Curtains:

(/current) Shakespearean Performance Institutions, Social Media, and Access (/previous) GEOFFREY WAY, ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY (/about)

ABSTRACT

As social media have become integral to the marketing practices of Shakespeare theaters and festivals, these and other digital technologies serve as the means for providing audiences with greater access to institutions' work with Shakespeare and performance. While they create new avenues for audiences to engage with institutions and their work, they also seem to signal a shift to a time of open access, in which audiences can interact with theaters and festivals like never before. However, rather than throwing open the gates and making all of theaters' and festivals' work available to online audiences, these claims to open access are more complex. To understand how access is changing, our definitions of access need to account for not only institutions and audiences, but also the technologies they are using to engage with one another. Institutions that incorporate social media into their marketing practices have to account for how the affordances and limitations of specific technologies, as well as their common user practices, reshape institution-audience interactions, destabilizing the level of control institutions maintain over their online content. This article argues that access should be thought of not in binary terms (open and closed), but rather as a spectrum influenced by institutions, audiences, and technologies alike. Ultimately, I contend that scholars need to consider issues of access further as new technologies and new methods for institution-audience interactions continue to be developed and integrated into Shakespeare theaters' and festivals' online audience outreach.

Access, however, means not only the opportunity to enter, approach, or make use of an existing collection or service, but something far more complex and subtle. It demands, in the first place, discriminating selections of resources in light of particular user interests and needs. It requires a www.borrowers.uga.edu/1756/show 1/25 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation more profound understanding than is presently held in the search strategies of those who seek knowledge and information in libraries and other information centers. — Robert A. Colby and Morris A. Gelfand

Shakespeare theaters and festivals are by nature concerned with their audience outreach, as these institutions rely on their audiences for both cultural and economic relevance. The ubiquity of digital media in today's world has led these theaters and festivals to adopt a common set of digital technologies as methods for audience outreach; often, these technologies have been made commonplace due to their audiences' expectations. Take, for example, the institutional website. For Shakespeare performance institutions, maintaining and updating an active website for their audiences has become a given. There is a clear set of expectations that institutions or businesses of any import will have established an online presence through a website, which generally acts as a portal to information and materials regarding the institution or business. Though their creation is often a result of audience expectations, institutions obviously benefit as well from operating these websites. For Shakespeare theaters and festivals, websites offer a means of crafting a guided user experience, allowing them to offer information to audiences on individual performances and entire seasons, theater or festival history and context, visitor information, and online ticket purchases.

More recently, one of the most prominent examples of exponential growth in theaters' and festivals' digital media usage has come in the form of social media. While social media continue to expand and proliferate, certain sites — Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest — have become media platforms for businesses and institutions to engage in digital outreach and to interact with their online audiences. It is not surprising, then, that Shakespeare festivals and theaters have also cultivated online presences in these spaces. But while the institution-audience interactions that occur on social media sites may in some ways resemble those that occur on institutional websites, social media are sites of user convergence that destabilize institutional control over materials, as users "are encouraged to seek out new information and make connections among dispersed media content" (Jenkins 2006b, 3). For institutions, there is a tradeoff that comes with that loss of control: social media offer the means for engaging with audiences in ways that do not often occur on institutional websites. Thus, as Shakespeare theaters and festivals create and maintain active institutional accounts and pages on social media sites, they give up a sense of full control over content in exchange for audience engagement on a greater scale than occurs on their own websites.

By juxtaposing institutional websites and social media against one another, I do not want to suggest that they represent binary sets of interactions for Shakespeare theaters and festivals and their audiences. Indeed, the four institutions that I address in this article — the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, the Royal Shakespeare Company, Shakespeare's Globe, and the Stratford Festival — all have expansive institutional websites as well as social media accounts on Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.1 Instead, I want to argue that we can learn from the types of interactions facilitated by each type of digital technology. The idea of institutional control over content in online spaces is rooted in a larger conversation regarding digital media and their ability to provide audiences access to institutional content. www.borrowers.uga.edu/1756/show 2/25 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation As Kate Rumbold has argued, digital media allow Shakespeare institutions to efface their walls for audiences and provide access to their content and materials (2010, 315). While this effacement permits institutions that house physical materials (such as the Folger Shakespeare Library) to generate interest in their holdings while simultaneously reifying their status as institutional holders and safe-keepers of cultural knowledge and value, the same cannot be said for Shakespeare theaters and festivals. For while libraries and museums court their audiences' investment through physical and digital collections, theaters and festivals face a different challenge as their missions and products are distinctly ephemeral. So what exactly do Shakespearean institutions that specialize in performance provide access to, and what role do new technologies play for those institutions as they strive to establish and maintain relevance with digital audiences? The answers to these questions are defined by issues of access, and throughout this article I will establish a theoretical framework for understanding the ways digital media, and in particular social media, influence the process of access and shape audience-institution interactions.

SHAPING INSTITUTIONAL IDENTITIES Access, commonly associated with specific cultural institutions such as archives, libraries, and museums, has also long shaped the practices of Shakespeare theaters and festivals. These institutions cultivate many of the same practices and values common to these other types of cultural institutions, and they are able to do so through their official websites. Institutional websites provide Shakespeare theaters and festivals the means to craft their online identities for audiences; they are able to choose the site design and content, building a certain type of experience for users who go to the site. Institutions can then use this control over design and content to fashion their digital presence in deliberate ways. These institutions have established and continually update websites available for their online audiences, and while each site hosts content unique to the institution, all four sites utilize similar conventions to achieve their goals. The sites for these four theaters and festivals contain a number of common components: prominent sections on current productions and seasons, links to purchase tickets, information on planning a visit, images and videos on performance and theater or festival history, educational links, and content about the current institutional mission and leadership. One of the most common practices is for an institution to have a page on its site devoted to the mission of the theater or festival, which is an interesting inclusion given that audiences are probably not visiting these sites to access such content. Yet each institution provides a clear statement defining its relationship to Shakespeare and approaches to performance, showing an investment in reaffirming the cultural value of both Shakespeare's and the institution's work while establishing its relevance with current audiences. Take, for example, the first two sections of the Stratford Festival's "Mandate": With William Shakespeare as its foundation, the Stratford Festival aims to set the standard for classical theatre in North America. Embracing our heritage of tradition and innovation, we seek to bring classical and contemporary theatre alive for an increasingly diverse audience.

www.borrowers.uga.edu/1756/show 3/25 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation For more than half a century, our mission has evolved to address the ever- changing, ever-challenging Canadian cultural landscape. What has remained constant, however, is our determination to create stimulating, thought- provoking productions of Shakespeare's plays, to examine other plays from the classical repertoire, and to foster and support the development of Canadian theatre practitioners. (2014) The mandate concludes with Stratford's commitment to engaging their audiences in performances that are both "innovative" and "reflective of [their audiences'] lives and communities" (2014). Through their mandate, the Stratford Festival announces an investment in Shakespeare, citing him as the foundation of the festival, while also declaring a commitment to performances by Canadians for Canadians. While Stratford's performers and audiences are not solely Canadian, their mandate positions the Festival as an institution of cultural value to its home nation.

A similar type of positioning can be seen in the mission statement for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. While much shorter than Stratford's mandate, the OSF's mission statement nonetheless displays a similar commitment: "Inspired by Shakespeare's work and the cultural richness of the United States, we reveal our collective humanity through illuminating interpretations of new and classic plays, deepened by the kaleidoscope of rotating repertory" (2009, 3). Again, there is a clear commitment to Shakespeare and to a national identity, in this case that of the United States. Both Stratford and the OSF are committed to performing the works of Shakespeare and to doing so for their respective national audiences. As destination theaters that rely on audiences traveling to either Stratford or Ashland to visit the festivals and see performances, positioning themselves as institutions devoted to preserving a national identity through the performance of Shakespeare's plays is a major part of their institutional identities. These institutions use the reaffirmation of Shakespeare's cultural value as a means of establishing and maintaining the importance of their service, but what exactly that value is remains unfixed: "Because 'Shakespeare' spans and now seemingly transcends categories of text, performance, and material heritage, in addition to symbolizing abstract qualities of beauty, morality, and knowledge, Shakespeare institutions have a necessarily incomplete grasp of his value" (Rumbold 2010, 315). Institutions use their mission statements to frame their conceptions of Shakespeare's cultural value for their audiences in particular ways, and both Stratford and the OSF locate their institutional value largely in their commitments to Shakespearean performance.

While each institution's devotion to reaffirming Shakespeare's cultural value through performance establishes the two festivals' value for their audiences, both Stratford and the OSF must also continue to attract new audiences to their institutional missions in order to remain relevant. Thus, in their mission statements, both institutions also convey certain approaches to performing Shakespeare's works, framing their performance practices as specifically relevant to their target audiences. This drive for relevance with audiences is clear in their devotion to their national identities, but it can also be seen in the selection of plays they choose to perform and in their descriptions of their performance www.borrowers.uga.edu/1756/show 4/25 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation practices. Though both institutions are devoted to Shakespeare, they also mention a commitment to performing plays beyond Shakespeare's canon, whether it's "classical and contemporary theatre" or "new and classic plays" (Stratford 2014; Oregon 2009). While Shakespeare is an important part of their institutional identities, both institutions recognize that they have to court their audiences through a variety of plays and performances, Shakespearean and otherwise. Along those lines, both festivals also realize that their performance practices need to be relevant for their target audiences, and so Stratford shows a commitment to "creating stimulating, thought-provoking productions" while the OSF is dedicated to revealing the audience's "collective humanity through illuminating interpretations" of the plays they perform (2014; 2009). For both institutions, reaffirming the legacy of Shakespeare and his plays is the touchstone that establishes their cultural importance and value, but it is through their performance approaches that they maintain their relevance with audiences.

These twin impulses of reaffirmation and tailored performance practices are also found in the mission statements of other theaters and festivals, though how they are framed can change based on the identity of the institution and its target audience. The Royal Shakespeare Company's statement entitled "Our Work" is indicative of how the reputation and reach of an institution can reshape these elements in specific ways: Our job is to connect and help others connect with Shakespeare and produce bold, ambitious work with living writers, actors and artists . . . We believe in taking risks and pushing creative boundaries — finding new ways of doing things and learning through action. Our audiences are at the heart of all we do and we want to challenge, inspire and involve them. Our home is in Stratford-upon-Avon and in 2010 we reopened the Royal Shakespeare and Swan theatres after a £112.8m transformation to bring actors and audiences closer together. We play regularly in London, Newcastle upon Tyne and on tour across the UK and the world. As well as the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, we produce new work from living artists and develop creative links with theatre-makers from around the world. We work with teachers to inspire a life-long love of Shakespeare in young people and run events for everyone to explore and participate in our work. (2014) The RSC, much like Stratford and the OSF, affirms their commitment to Shakespeare and their approaches for performance. However, the RSC positions itself differently as both a destination theater and a company that tours nationally and globally. The RSC is also able to levy the historical significance of Stratford- upon-Avon to their advantage, and so the reaffirmation of the cultural value of Shakespeare's plays becomes intertwined with the cultural heritage of the Bard's hometown. There is a commitment to creating an engaging experience for the RSC's audience in their statement as well, indicated by both the financial cost of their recent transformation and their dedication to connecting with their audience to "challenge, inspire, and involve them" in performances (2014).

Shakespeare's Globe also uses historical significance in its institutional mission available on the "Our Purpose" page of the Globe website: "The Shakespeare Globe Trust is dedicated to the experience and international understanding of www.borrowers.uga.edu/1756/show 5/25 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Shakespeare in performance. Uniquely its work celebrates the fact that the greatest dramatic poet in the English language lived and worked in London and that the cradle of English theatre was on Bankside by the River Thames" (2014).2 This mission statement intertwines the uniqueness of the physical location and its historical significance to the Globe. Whereas the RSC implicitly uses the historical significance of Stratford-upon-Avon in its mission statement, the Globe makes the significance of its location explicit for its audience. Both the RSC and the Globe use the link between their physical locations and Shakespeare's history as a means of establishing relevance with their audiences through claims of Shakespearean authenticity, and they are able to levy this authenticity in a way that the Stratford Festival and the OSF are unable to. All four institutions are invested in reaffirming Shakespeare's cultural value with audiences through specific approaches to performance, but the RSC and Globe also use their physical locations as major selling points for their relevance with audiences. The Globe, in particular, focuses on establishing its relevance with audiences through the historical value of its location rather than its performance approaches, which are covered under the umbrella of the Globe's focus on original performance practices. Even as they do so, each institution's claims of authenticity, cultural value, or performance practices highlight that their websites are part of a mediated culture in which their design and content choices make them "as much creators, as mediators, of 'Shakespeare'" (Rumbold 2010, 335).

The mission statements of these four theaters and festivals provide insight into how each institution positions itself as a purveyor of Shakespearean cultural value through an emphasis on reaffirmation, performance, and history. On their individual websites, each institution is able to shape a specific institutional identity for its online audience, and even though the audiences differ from institution to institution, they are united through their common identity as theaters and festivals concerned first and foremost with live Shakespeare performance. It is their institutional identities as theaters and festivals that set them apart from libraries, museums, archives, and other cultural institutions, as they provide their audiences with access to the ephemeral product of Shakespearean performance, as opposed to physical artifacts or objects safeguarded behind institutional walls.3 Here, I would return to this essay's epigraph from Colby and Gelfand: while we traditionally conceive of libraries, museums, and archives as information centers, Shakespeare performance institutions also operate as information centers, especially as they generate greater online presences. This is not to say that the missions of theaters and festivals are synonymous with those of more traditional information centers, but that Shakespearean performance institutions also have a vested interest in negotiating the avenues of access to a variety of content that is of interest for their digital audiences. Much of this content is structured around establishing and maintaining the value of live Shakespeare performance with audiences, whether that comes through mission statements and historical information, performance images and video clips, or even video games.

The mission statements of these four institutions also reveal that in recent years, Shakespeare has seemingly become a performance product for a niche audience. Christie Carson has discussed how "the increasing influence of the digital work in both performance and in the critical reception of live theatre" has led to theaters www.borrowers.uga.edu/1756/show 6/25 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation and festivals "trying to cater to two kinds of audiences simultaneously: first a local specialized audience, and second a general international audience" (2008, 280). Each institution also provides different levels of emphasis on the content they offer; as larger, internationally recognized institutions, the RSC and the Globe provide a large amount of educational materials online for anyone interested, while Stratford and the OSF hold more of their educational materials for the classes and groups that physically visit the festivals. Though each institution may work broadly to target a global audience, the audiences that they engage with on a regular basis will usually be more localized, which is evidenced in part by the fact that all four sites are only available in English, and specialized, which is shown by the types and relevance of content available for audiences on each site. Targeting a niche audience brings with it many challenges for these institutions, and chief among them is the challenge of competing in what Richard Lanham calls the attention economy. Lanham argues that given the massive amounts of information available through digital technologies, we have shifted away from an information economy, and that we are now in a moment when human attention has become the scarce resource being competed over (2006, xi). Thus, each theater or festival is tasked with attracting and maintaining their audiences' attention in order to remain relevant, a significant task when each institution is bound to a physical location that is not always within traveling distance for their online audiences. As a result, these institutions have extended their audience outreach to include digital media, and in particular social media, as new avenues of access for audiences. Shakespeare performance institutions are utilizing digital media outreach to compete in a more global and ever-growing attention economy, but to do so they have to incorporate these media into their existing outreach strategies, renegotiate issues of access both in terms of content and extent, and navigate the various constraints placed on the institutions by their own missions and their audiences. Adopting digital media into their outreach practices brings with it numerous questions: what should audiences have access to, what access will entice audiences to invest in institutions and their missions, and what should remain under institutional control? These questions are all rooted in the concept of access, and therefore it is imperative to establish a framework for thinking about access and its functions for Shakespeare theaters and festivals before exploring the role that social media play within that framework.

DEFINING ACCESS While the term access has been employed in numerous fields and contexts, many of which are not associated with the recent proliferation of digital media, I am specifically interested in the ways that access is applied to digital media and the Internet. Access has been discussed often and at length with regard to libraries, museums, archives, and other traditional information centers, yet it has not been addressed in detail within discussions of Shakespeare performance institutions.4 Theaters and festivals tend to be left outside the purview of discussions regarding cultural institutions and access that link access to issues of gatekeeping and theorize the role cultural institutions play in granting audiences access to cultural materials and artifacts.5 However, traditional gatekeeping theories usually adopt a model similar to Adorno and Horkheimer's 1987 "hypodermic" model of culture (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002), focusing on a one-way model of access where www.borrowers.uga.edu/1756/show 7/25 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation information is delivered from media outlets to audiences. These gatekeeping models do not account for other important factors that influence the process of access, such as the technologies actually used to provide that access. In order to account for technologies and other factors that shape access, we have to move beyond traditional notions of gatekeeping.

Informatics scholar Karine Barzilai-Nahon's theory of "network gatekeeping" offers a model for such an approach. She redefines gatekeeping as "a dynamic and contextual interpretation of gatekeeping referring to gatekeepers as stakeholders who change their gatekeeping roles depending on the stakeholder with whom they interact and/or the context in which they are situated" (2008, 1494). This formulation importantly recognizes that any study of access and gatekeeping must acknowledge that the role gatekeepers play is dynamic in nature, with various stakeholders negotiating access for different audiences. Network gatekeeping offers a model for understanding the fluid nature of access, accounting for the changing roles and expectations for audiences and institutions that seek to gain access and provide it. As we begin to think of access as a two-way street between audiences and institutions, we can see that the institution's role in facilitating access is not fixed, and that audiences can be influential in the process. The role of gatekeeper is never stable, and as institutions continue to adopt digital media into their outreach practices, the fluidity of gatekeeping roles becomes more apparent. Network gatekeeping theory takes an important step forward by recognizing gatekeeping as a dynamic process influenced by several parties and factors. However, as a theory it focuses more on the influence that networks between institutions and audiences have on the process of access than on the digital media used to create and maintain those networks.

Barzilai-Nahon's theory begins to intertwine the concepts of gatekeeping and access, and in doing so, accounts for the active roles audiences and institutions play in defining access; yet with the proliferation of digital media in all facets of our lives, network gatekeeping theory does not account in any sort of depth for the role that those media play in shaping access. For as technological access has become a given for many audiences, we now see access appear in conjunction with words and phrases such as "open," "universal," and "behind-the-scenes." Access is often paired with other concepts, such as participation and creativity, as Rumbold has discussed, and these pairings emphasize the positive aspects of digital media and what they can offer for digital audiences, particularly for the audiences of these Shakespeare performance institutions (2010, 324).6 These reappropriations of access and associations with the positive rhetoric regarding the potential of digital media have in essence shifted the connotation of access from gatekeeping to gate-opening. While this shift represents what many institutions and audiences see as the perceived potential of digital media and their ability to change the contexts and expectations through which access occurs, this shift either relies on the notion that access is still a binary — access is either opened or closed — or that digital media are nothing more than the gateways through which access occurs. Such approaches to digital media and access usually assume a priori that new technologies passively offer open access, and that this access is always beneficial for all involved.

www.borrowers.uga.edu/1756/show 8/25 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation As informed by the content-driven notions of access I mentioned above, these approaches also fail to recognize the need to understand access as a spectrum influenced by several factors, especially the technologies that provide such access in the first place. Moreover, these approaches do not address the fact that a proliferation of content is not synonymous with an increase in access. As Richard Burt has argued, we need to recognize "that Shakespeare's reproduction in mass culture is not identical with greater public access, whether or not the form Shakespeare takes in a given medium or subgenre is thought to be intelligent or stupid" (2002, 5). We cannot focus solely on the amount of Shakespearean content available for online audiences at the expense of understanding and theorizing how that content is accessed by audiences. For example, we may have more filmed versions of Shakespearean stage performances available now than we have had access to at any time in the past. However, if those performances are accessible only through technologies that mimic traditional notions of access (e.g., expensive paywalls or programs and websites with specific technological requirements), then no significant shift in access has occurred. Since these models of access are common practice for numerous businesses and institutions online (Shakespearean and otherwise), we cannot simply assume that digital media provide access that is automatically free, open, or universal. To account for how digital media influence the process of access, we have to move beyond traditional conceptions of access and gatekeeping while addressing the influence digital media have on that process.

Bruno Latour's actor-network-theory offers a model for considering the effects digital technologies have on the dynamic nature of access (2005, 9). Instead of focusing solely on human actants (that is, audiences and institutions), actor- network-theory also accounts for the influence of non-human actants, such as technology and media. This is not necessarily to say that technologies, media, or objects have their own agency within the scope of actor-network-theory, but that they do exert influence on the interactions and relationships of the actants within those networks. Latour's theory shifts us away from a focus on one-directional relationships and towards a consideration of the complex and ever-evolving negotiations among audiences, institutions, and the technologies and media they use. Using actor-network-theory, we can theorize how digital media operate as mediators, shaping the interactions between audiences and institutions in different ways. In the remainder of this article, I will focus on how three specific social media sites — Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest — serve as mediators between these four Shakespeare performance institutions and their audiences to highlight the influence of digital media on the process of access.

SOCIAL MEDIA AND ACCESS As discussed above, the institutional website offers a space of control for institutions, allowing them to post the content they want to share and frame their identities in specific ways. However, though Shakespeare theaters and festivals may want their websites, or at least certain aspects of these sites, to become spaces of deep institution-audience engagement, the specter of institutional control may very well deter audiences from engaging with the institutions in these online spaces. For instance, on the RSC's blog Whispers from the Wings, cast and crew www.borrowers.uga.edu/1756/show 9/25 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation from current productions write posts about their experiences during the rehearsal and performance process. Each post on the blog has the option for users to provide responses to the post, though the posts have generated little response from users on the site. For the posts from 2013, the largest number of comments on a post was six (which only happened once), while the majority of the posts had no user comments at all. One reason for this might be the process for commenting on a blog. Users are asked to provide their names with comments (including an email address is optional), complete a Captcha to confirm they are personally writing the post, and also agree to the following statement: "We reserve the right not to publish your comments, and please note that any contribution you make is subject to our website terms of use."7 While this language is in place to deter users from flaming, spamming, or posting inappropriate or negative comments, it can make users feel that their comments are being monitored in such a way that their responses to blog posts must be positive in nature. These constraints may also discourage users from commenting on posts if they feel that the space is not open to the full range of audience feedback. Looking through the responses reveals that this may be part of the issue, as most are short and overwhelmingly positive in nature, whether indicating excitement about a performance, wishing luck to the cast and crew, or commenting on the experience of seeing a live performance at the RSC.

Though I do think this institutional control over the user activity on theater and festival websites is a factor in the low amount of comments and interaction in these spaces, the fact is that these websites are designed first and foremost around providing audiences with a wealth of information regarding the institutions, their productions, and visitor information. The homepage of each institution's site includes numerous links to other pages, and while one of these links directs users to the institution's blog, these links are often buried among the others on the homepage. For example, on the homepage of their institutional sites, the Globe, the OSF, and the RSC all provide links to their respective blogs. However, these links are located the bottom of the homepage, and so users must scroll down to find them, something they may not do given the number of links available at the top of each page (see Appendix: Image 1). Even though institutions have created these spaces on their sites to generate an interactive user experience and engage with their online audiences, users' attention is not being drawn to those spaces. At the same time, users are often visiting these sites with specific purposes in mind, such as buying tickets, finding information about visiting the theaters or festivals, or locating teaching materials. The institutions may create online spaces where they hope to generate interaction between the institutions and their audiences, but those audiences are not regularly navigating to institutional websites looking for those types of interactions. Thus, these spaces are inactive more as a result of the audience's inattention to these spaces, rather than to the constraints placed on interactions by the institutions.

As institutions work within the attention economy to draw users to their websites, they also have to consider what content on their own sites will attract their users' attention. With multiple spaces on each institutional websites vying for their audiences' attention, users are more likely to visit these sites, find the information they need, and then move on, rather than spend time exploring the various spaces www.borrowers.uga.edu/1756/show 10/25 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation the site has to offer. While institutions are able to bring audiences interested in Shakespeare theaters and festivals to their sites, these websites are not designed primarily as spaces for audience-institution interactions. This does not mean that these institutions are unable to interact with their audiences in these spaces, but that these are not spaces designed to sustain audience engagement over long periods of time. However, these institutions are finding more success by entering into online spaces where such engagement already occurs and seeking out their audiences in these spaces. Hence, Shakespeare theaters and festivals are finding it beneficial to establish their presence on certain social media sites, particularly Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest, sites that Aimee Morrison identifies as "coaxing technologies" (2014). These three sites rely on their users' active participation, and coax them to post status updates, share content, and engage with other users, institutions, and businesses. For Shakespeare performance institutions, it makes sense to enter into these spaces, as they are already sites of heavy user activity among their audiences. These institutions broadcast their social media presences on their websites through buttons that consist of the recognizable logo for each social media site, and occasionally through embedding the feed from their social media accounts on their homepage, as the Globe does with their Twitter feed (see Appendix: Image 2). They also coax their audiences into engaging with them on social media with phrases like "Keep in Touch," "Connect with Us," or "Get the Latest News." By creating and establishing various social media presences, theaters and festivals hope to engage with their audiences in ways that are not as easily facilitated on their institutional websites.

Institution Facebook Twitter Pinterest Oregon Shakespeare Festival 30,850 5,699 436 Royal Shakespeare Company 41,337 89,974 434 Shakespeare's Globe 59,734 49,091 601 Stratford Festival 42,128 12,903 330

Table 1: Shakespeare Performance Institutions' Digital Audiences as of 29 May 2013

Institution Facebook Twitter Pinterest Oregon Shakespeare Festival 34,301 6,987 539 Royal Shakespeare Company 51,823 136,978 716 Shakespeare's Globe 92,929 72,780 1,140 Stratford Festival 48,921 14,930 453

Table 2: Shakespeare Performance Institutions' Digital Audiences as of 18 February 2014

These institutions are gaining a foothold in the attention economy by establishing a presence on social media and going to where their audiences are already active. Instead of competing for their audiences' attention to come and engage on their individual sites, theaters and festivals utilize the fact that their audiences are already in these spaces. As institutions move onto social media sites, they have to www.borrowers.uga.edu/1756/show 11/25 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation renegotiate their expectations and come to terms with the fact that they are not able to exert the same type of control on social media sites that they are able to on their institutional websites. As Shakespeare theaters and festivals enter these spaces, they relinquish some of their control over content in order to tap into a larger online audience base and engage more effectively with their audiences in order to compete in the attention economy. They gain access to an audience base that is dynamic and continually growing, as is evidenced by the two tables above. However, competing for their audiences' attention in these spaces requires more than just creating an account on a site or posting content. Institutions looking to grant their audiences access to content in these spaces must do so effectively, and this means that they must be aware of the affordances and limitations not only of the general technology they are using (e.g., social media) but also of the individual platforms they provide access through (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest) (Norman 2002, 9). For while there are elements that link these social media together under a common banner, acceptable and effective interactions on each site are defined by a different set of technological affordances. If theaters and festivals want to engage with their audiences through social media, it is imperative that they understand how to interact effectively with them in these online spaces. It is the affordances and limitations of these platforms that shape how access occurs on these sites in varying ways. Moreover, by understanding the affordances of these social media and their effects on the process of access, we can see just how social media operate as mediators among these institutions and their online audiences.

A quick look at Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest reveals some elements common among the three sites. As examples of what danah boyd and Nicole Ellison call social network sites, all three allow users to establish their own personal networks, of which they are the center (2007, 211). All three platforms rely on a type of feed on their homepage that present users with content and posts from other members of their networks. Content updates come in the form of text, images, videos, and hyperlinks to external content, and each site makes it simple for users to share content and posts with others. Those who do not look closely at each site may assume that they are simply three versions of the same thing, but in doing so they fail to understand the distinct differences among how the sites work. Although each site is an example of social media, they use separate sets of technological constraints that shape how users create their own social networks on the site. Facebook requires users to friend others they want in their network, and then other users must accept the friend request to be added to the network. On Twitter, users can follow other users without needing permission, and they can also be followed by others without reciprocation. Pinterest operates under a logic similar to that of Twitter, though users are also able to follow an individual board of a user without having to follow the actual user on the site. The differences between the three sites are not limited to how users create their networks. All three sites have content feeds for their users, but Facebook organizes that content based on an algorithm, while Twitter and Pinterest present posts chronologically. Though these feeds initially present content to users in fixed ways, each site allows users to search posts and access content through other methods, such as the hashtag on Twitter (a feature later adopted by Facebook) and the personalized lists on Facebook and Twitter that users can create to build smaller, more focused www.borrowers.uga.edu/1756/show 12/25 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation newsfeeds. On Pinterest, users are able to search on a term and find all the public pins related to that term.

My goal here is not to chart an exhaustive list of the differences between these three social media sites. Rather, it is to highlight that each site operates under its own logic for creating networks and searching and delivering content among those networks based on its particular affordances and limitations. As Shakespeare theaters and festivals have established their presence on these different sites, they have had to negotiate with the technological affordances of each one. On Facebook, each institution is able to make a public page from which users can choose to receive updates. On Twitter and Pinterest, the institutions are able to establish public accounts that users can follow in their feeds. However, once they become part of users' networks, these institutions still have to utilize the technology effectively to stay engaged with their online followers. To stay competitive with other institutions in an attention economy, they must work on updating their social media accounts consistently to remain current with their online audiences; to this end, all four institutions have staff member positions dedicated to running their social media accounts, and it is their job to work on navigating the individual attention economy of each social media platform. Since users have content delivered chronologically on Twitter and Pinterest, institutions that post frequently are more likely to gain greater exposure with their online audiences. However, Facebook's Edgerank algorithm uses three different aspects — affinity, weight, and time decay — to determine what posts a user sees and in what order (Applum 2014). Edgerank calculates what posts from an institutional site the user will see based on the number of interactions the user has had with the institution's account, the amount and types of feedback a post has received, and the age of the post. The user's interactions and the feedback a post has received are key factors in the algorithm, so in a sense a quality post that receives a lot of user feedback outweighs numerous posts that receive no user feedback, especially if institutions are striving for greater exposure with other Facebook users. Though Edgerank provides institutions with insight into how their audience members interact with their content, the audiences themselves are often less aware of the algorithms that determine what updates they see and in what order.8

Social media also influence how institutions structure access to their content in another important way: the need to understand that the materials they share online become what Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green call "spreadable" content that audiences can share with others "for their own purposes, sometimes with the permission of rights holders, sometimes against their wishes" (2013, 3). Unlike institutional websites, where content is embedded in the site, Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest all facilitate easy and straightforward methods for users to share content from other users among their own individual networks. This ease of sharing means that institutional content can spread away from the institution's site and therefore from the institution's control, and so each institution has to be aware of exactly how content spreads on these sites and adjust their interactions accordingly. Pinterest is actually designed as a social media site that emphasizes sharing content as its primary function. To pin any sort of content to the site, there must be an image to feature in the post, and the users' Pinterest feed itself emphasizes the images over the text (See Appendix: Image 3). www.borrowers.uga.edu/1756/show 13/25 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation While each pin is usually accompanied by some written text as well, the text is often secondary to the image. Pins can be spread very quickly between users and through Pinterest's recommended pins, which are provided to users based on the content of what they pin. A user may pin many pieces of Shakespearean content to their own accounts that come from any number of other users on the site, so institutions have to account for this and craft posts that include important information with the pin. Content shared via Pinterest also exemplifies Douglas Lanier's "post-textual Shakespeare," as the images are what operate as "Shakespearean" for users on the site (2011). For example, a Stratford Festival pin from their 2014 season production of Antony and Cleopatra features a picture of the two actors playing Antony and Cleopatra in costume. Embedded at the bottom of the image are the names of the two actors. In the text accompanying the image, users are provided with numerous pieces of information: the name of the play, the director, the dates and theater for the production, and a summary of the play. Stratford crafts their pins in a way that highlights the image and information they hope will be spread by users throughout the site, recognizing that the image, more than the information, will lead to users spreading their content and sharing it with others.

Compared to the image-heavy focus of Pinterest, Facebook provides more of a balance between text and images in its posts. The platform also facilitates simple methods of sharing content among users' networks, though unlike on Pinterest, the posts shared by Facebook users must be posted by someone in their own network before they may share it with others. However, the content of a post also influences whether the audience may respond to it, and how that post may then be received and shared by other users. Facebook is more conducive to users responding directly to content shared on the site. Yet given the sheer amount of information that comes through a Facebook user's news feed and the Edgerank algorithm's method for organizing that information for users, theaters and festivals may feel pressured to produce stand-out posts that grab audiences' attention and to engage an online public in institutional content. The most popular method is to include an image or video with every update. For example, during the month of February 2014 (which marked the start of their 2014 season), of the over fifty status updates shared by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival on their Facebook page, only four did not have an image or video embedded in the post. While individual posts varied in terms of the responses they received on the site, some receiving numerous likes and comments while others less so, the inclusion of images and videos makes these posts more likely to stand out among the numerous other posts individual users will see in their personal feeds and facilitate the audience's engagement with their content (See Appendix: Image 4). Much as Stratford did with their post on Pinterest, the OSF structures the content shared with audiences on the site to grab their attention, in hopes of having them engage with it.

Twitter presents a different type of challenge for Shakespeare theaters and festivals than either Pinterest or Facebook. Creating effective content on Twitter requires knowledge of both its technological affordances and its common user practices. While Twitter posts can and do include images and videos in their posts, this content has only recently become more visible for users in their actual feeds. www.borrowers.uga.edu/1756/show 14/25 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Any user of Twitter will be familiar with its conventions and the ease with which it allows users to share media. Tweets are usually text-based (and limited to 140 characters). However, Twitter is habitually used to share images or videos that now appear users' feeds, as they can create posts with embedded images, video thumbnails, and hyperlinks to other pages containing content. While the text of a post may catch a user's eye while scrolling through the feed, institutions can now rely on the images in their posts to grasp the audience's attention along with the text, and doing so can greatly increase user response.9 A successful post on Twitter will not just meet the platform's character limitation; while Twitter's limitations circumscribe how content is formatted and disseminated to users, it is the users themselves who regulate what the accepted user guidelines and practices are for the Twitter community. As Nancy Baym states, "Community norms of practice are displayed, reinforced, negotiated, and taught through members' shared behaviors," and so while institutions can share content with their audiences on the site, to do so effectively means that they have to participate in a way that the user community finds meaningful (2010, 80). When institutions are aware of the common user practices on social media sites like Twitter (and Pinterest and Facebook), they are able to engage their audiences in these online spaces and not simply deliver content to them. Examples of these practices are evident in the recent posts shared through the Stratford Festival's Twitter account @stratfest.10 Stratford is able to participate in the site by adopting common practices such as following their own followers on the site, replying publicly to posts from their followers, retweeting what those followers have posted about Stratford for a larger audience, and crafting engaging updates for their followers using 140 characters or less.

It is important to note here that the specific affordances and limitations of Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest, and the common user practices that I have discussed above, are by no means fixed. Users of any of these or the numerous other social media sites available online know that change is the only constant on these sites. The technological constraints are continually undergoing change, and the user community responds by incorporating these new changes into the common user practices of each site. Shakespeare theaters and festivals using social media to facilitate access for their audience have to be able to adjust to the technologies they use and to how those technologies mediate their interactions. Whereas institutions may currently operate using a specific set of practices to provide audiences access by sharing institutional materials on these sites, future changes made to any of these sites can drastically alter the methods for sharing and distributing content. Though there may be overlap in the institutions' audiences on the three sites, they cannot assume a singular notion of the audience-as-users; they must be able to interact with the individual audiences on each site, while also being aware of the fact that newer sites for engagement may appear and take the place of older ones (van Dijck 2009, 54). Thus, to actively engage and maintain audience interest through social media, Shakespeare theaters and festivals must continually adapt to the new ways that social media influence the process of access, while also being aware of and ready to work with newer social media and user trends.11

www.borrowers.uga.edu/1756/show 15/25 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation As social media sites offer institutions new avenues to provide access to and engage their online audiences, they also shift the role audiences play in the process of access. As is evident above, users exert considerable influence by establishing and maintaining the common practices of a given site, as well as determining the sites for such access. Shakespeare theaters and festivals are finding it necessary to engage their audiences online, and so they are going to the sites on which their audiences are already active, instead of hoping that their audiences will always come to their institutional websites. This change emphasizes the role audiences can and do play in determining sites of access, as they are able to influence the sites through which access occurs. Digital media, and social media in particular, have helped "to shift audience expectations creating a demand for information and experiences that extend beyond the theatre building and the moment of performance" (Carson 2008, 274). It is the audience's expectations that determine where institutions place their time and effort in using digital media to generate content; the fact that these theaters and festivals have established active presences on these social media sites indicates a shift away from the idea that audiences are only passive entities waiting to receive content. Social media and other digital media do not operate only as mediators for the shaping of content in the process of access. They are also allowing audiences to exert influence on the process by determining the sites and defining the practices institutions have to use when engaging with their audiences on these sites.

PERFORMING RELEVANCE In the final section of this article, I want to return to the questions I introduced earlier: what exactly is it that Shakespearean performance institutions provide access to, and how do social media help them to establish and maintain their relevance with digital audiences? For while social media may represent a middle ground between institutions and audiences where institutions lose some control over their content, the fact is that institutions gain quite a bit more by entering into these spaces. Through the practices outlined above, we can see that Shakespeare theaters and festivals show how, as Rumbold states, "Embracing the positive discourse of the Internet — interactivity, participation, creativity — can alter a cultural organization's relationship to its own value" (2010, 314). As they compete in an attention economy to maintain their relevance with their online audiences, these four institutions are not able to rely on audiences coming to their own websites, and so they have had to reconsider their methods for audience outreach. However, since these are institutions that specialize in live Shakespearean performance and rely on audiences physically attending those performances, they have to find a balance between providing audiences access to engaging performance materials online and enticing audiences to visit the theater or festival and attend those live performances. If institutions offer too little content online, they risk losing the audiences' attention and possibly becoming irrelevant in these online spaces; if they offer access to too much content, their audiences may not see the need to visit the theater or festival and see the performance live. This tightrope is one that Shakespeare theaters and festivals must negotiate more and more as they position themselves to remain relevant with online audiences in an attention economy.

www.borrowers.uga.edu/1756/show 16/25 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation One move that Shakespeare theaters and festivals have made to engage their online audiences is to open up the rehearsal process and grant more behind-the- scenes access. The rehearsal process has traditionally been closed off to audiences, particularly in western theater, and to share images and video clips from the rehearsal process with audiences represents a break from tradition (Holland 2009, 258). So when the Globe shares an interview with Gemma Arterton on her performance in the Globe's 2014 run of The Duchess of Malfi, or the OSF posts images of the actors rehearsing on set for their 2014 production of The Comedy of Errors, they offer the audience a chance to access the rehearsal process by peeking behind the curtains during the weeks leading up to the performances.12

In providing this access, they are simultaneously keeping their online audiences engaged and also generating interest in their current and upcoming performances. Both institutions still maintain control over what they provide access to and to what extent, but they, as well as the RSC and Stratford, recognize the benefits of opening up access to keep their audiences interested and invested in their current and upcoming productions throughout a theatrical season as well as their overall institutional missions. While the move to open up behind-the-scenes access to the rehearsal process is a recent development for Shakespeare theaters and festivals, it also represents a moment in which these institutions are adopting long-standing marketing practices used by film and television. Film and television have long understood the effectiveness of sharing behind-the-scenes content throughout the rehearsal process leading up to the release of a film or show to build the audience's interest and keep them engaged until the actual release. In recent years, these techniques common to film and television have become more prominent in the practices of theaters and festivals, to the point where it has become standard to create film trailers for both individual productions and entire theatrical seasons. Though in some ways, theaters are catching up to film and television by adopting practices to engage their audiences throughout the rehearsal process, they are also participating in a longer trend of remediating the practices of other media into their own (Bolter and Grusin 2000, 55). The trailers themselves do not represent an entirely new approach to providing access for audiences, but they remediate live performances and, as Philip Auslander argues, continually shape the audience's definition and expectation of what it is that constitutes the live performance (2008).

However, even as they remediate these practices from other media, theaters and festivals are also changing the nature of the live performance event itself. In Theatre Audiences, Susan Bennett establishes the two frames that define the theatrical audience as the outer frame, containing the "cultural elements which create and inform the theatrical event," and the inner frame, containing "the dramatic production in a particular playing space" (2003, 139). Bennett argues that it is at the intersection of these two frames — the meeting between these cultural elements and the live dramatic production — that a particular theatrical experience occurs for the audience. Social media offer the potential to extend the outer frame of the theatrical event, providing audiences access to behind-the- scenes content, marketing materials, personal and professional reviews, so that while the audience may come together in a physical space for a live performance, their engagement with the performance can long precede them stepping through www.borrowers.uga.edu/1756/show 17/25 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation the theater doors, and continue long after they leave the theater at the end of the performance. Institutions must also be aware that while social media and other digital media can extend the outer frame of a theatrical event, the reach of that extension is not infinite or global. As theaters and festivals utilize social media to create new avenues for audience access, they "expand the territory of a production, rather than de-territorialize it" (Li Lan 2003, 52).13 So even as these institutions work to target both a local and global audience, social media are more likely to help them expand the territory of both a particular production and the institution's audience, but that territory will still have boundaries. By expanding more and more into social media and other online spaces, these institutions and their audience also generate a wealth of content that can help institutions and performances scholars alike to reconstruct what Margaret Jane Kidnie refers to as the "bombsite" of performance (2008, 108).

For Shakespeare theaters and festivals, social media are a means of facilitating audience engagement with the institutions, their performances, and their overall missions to establish and maintain their relevance with online audiences. Using social media to provide audiences access to institutional content means that theaters and festivals may have to relinquish some of the control over their content and materials. At the same time, institutions gain the ability to engage with audiences more directly and on a larger scale than they have been able to in the past. As Shakespeare institutions continue to expand their online presences through the use of digital media, they will need to address how audiences are able to influence directly the sites of access and to reflect on what their institutional goals actually are when it comes to digital access. If theaters and festivals hope to engage their online audiences through social media in meaningful ways, they cannot rely on traditional notions of access when structuring their methods for digital outreach. In analyzing these and other online interactions between audience and institutions, we as scholars must also be able to understand the factors that influence access, and the ways that the media themselves can become mediators in the interactions between Shakespearean performance institutions and their audiences. We must also continue to be aware that the affordances and limitations of these technologies are continually changing, and that while the Globe, the OSF, the RSC, and Stratford are cultivating their presences on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest, newer technologies and social media may supplant the popularity or usefulness of these sites in the future. Above all, institutions and scholars alike need to recognize that access is not simply a one- way street for mass media institutions to deliver content to passive audiences. Rather, it is a complex process, one continually shaped and influenced by the technologies, the institutions themselves, and their audiences, both online and offline.

APPENDIX: IMAGES

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Image 1: A screenshot of the Royal Shakespeare Company's Homepage

Image 2: A screenshot of the Globe social media buttons and embedded Twitter feed

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Image 3: A screenshot of the Stratford Festival's Behind the Scenes Pinterest Board

Image 4: Posts from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival's Facebook Page

NOTES 1. Though I have chosen these four institutions mainly for their level of online engagement with their audiences, I recognize that all four can be considered traditional Shakespeare theaters and festivals. This overlap is not coincidence; instead, it speaks to the fact that even in an increasingly global context, established Anglophone theaters and festivals enjoy an advantage in building and maintaining their online presences and audience engagement.

www.borrowers.uga.edu/1756/show 20/25 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2. On this page of the Globe's website, one finds both this short statement and a longer one that defines their "purpose through three central and inter-dependent activities": offering exhibitions focusing on Shakespeare and theater historically; maintaining excellence in international performance; and operating as a research hub for all interested in Shakespeare and performance (2014). 3. This is not to say that these theaters and festivals do not have a commitment to preserving and safeguarding their performance artifacts and materials (as each has a more traditional information center under its banner devoted on the preservation of both physical and ephemeral performance materials), but that this objective is usually secondary to the main goal of promoting live performance. 4. For more on how audiences use access as a means of appropriating the digital content of cultural institutions, see Feinberg 2011; on the benefits of open access models of scholarly publication, see Fitzpatrick 2012; for a look at the present and near future of access, see Hosek 2008; and for discussions of access for cultural institutions (particularly libraries) in an attention economy, see Lanham 2008. 5. For a brief history of gatekeeping and discussions of its current usage in journalism, see Shoemaker and Vos 2009. For an in-depth study of the history and use of the term "gatekeeping" among different disciplines, see Barzilai-Nahon 2009. 6. Other examples of this are Pierre Lévy's concept of "collective intelligence" (1997), which has led to much of the current thinking on concepts such as "crowdsourcing," and to a lesser extent, Henry Jenkins's definition of participatory culture (2006a). 7. This statement can be found on the bottom of every blog post on the Whispers from the Wings blog. Similar language can be found accompanying individual posts on the Globe's Adopt an Actor section of their site. While the OSF's blog and Stratford's Wordpress site do not explicitly include such language, the same set of guidelines seems implicitly to guide user activity on these sites. 8. For more on the news feed, see Chris Taylor's article "Why Facebook Won't Give You a Straight-Up News Feed" (2012). 9. Though the addition of inline images is a fairly recent development, several social media strategy sites have discussed the potential impact of the change. For more, see Cooper 2013, Elahi 2013, and Maher 2013. 10. See feed at https://twitter.com/stratfest (https://twitter.com/stratfest). 11. Though it is beyond the scope of this paper, it is important to note that Shakespeare theaters and festivals have to not only adapt to changes in social media, but also they must navigate various union and copyright issues when sharing content online featuring actors and performances. 12. The Arterton interviews can be found on the Globe's Adopt an Actor site. The OSF images have been shared through their public Facebook page. 13. Li Lan also asks, "Yet as photographs, illustrations, reviews, interviews, cast lists, and even in some cases video clips are mounted on the web, can we continue to think of a performance event as (only) occupying a local geographical and cultural space, when its audience community (that defines it as a performance) is not 'naturally' confined to its theatre audience, but artificially extended to everywhere else (and no specific place) as well, 'globalized', as we call it?" (2003, 48).

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REFERENCES Applum. 2014. "What is Edgerank?" Available online at: http://whatisedgerank.com (http://whatisedgerank.com) [accessed 12 June 2014; link no longer operative]. Auslander, Philip. 2008. Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture. Second edition. New York: Routledge. Barzilai-Nahon, Karine. 2009. "Gatekeeping: A Critical Review." Annual Review of Information Science and Technology 43: 433-78. Barzilai-Nahon, Karine. 2008. "Toward a Theory of Network Gatekeeping: A Framework for Exploring Information Control." Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 59.9: 1493-512. Baym, Nancy. 2010. Personal Connections in the Digital Age. Malden: Polity. Bennett, Susan. 2003. Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception. Second edition. New York: Routledge. Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. 2000. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. boyd, danah, and Nicole Ellison. 2007. "Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship." Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13.1: 210-30. Burt, Richard. 2002. "To E- or Not to E-? Disposing of Schlockspeare in the Age of Digital Media." In Shakespeare After Mass Media. Edited by Richard Burt. New York: Palgrave. 1-32. Carson, Christie. 2008. "eShakespeare and Performance." Shakespeare 4.3: 270-86. Carson, Christie. 1999. "Theatre and Technology: Battling with the Box." Digital Creativity 10.3: 129-34. Colby, Robert A., and Morris A. Gelfand. 1974. "Introduction." In Access to the Literature of the Social Sciences and Humanities. Edited by Robert A. Colby and Morris A. Gelfand. Flushing, N.Y.: Queens College Press. 6-8. Cooper, Belle Beth. 2013. "How Twitter's Expanded Images Increase Clicks, Retweets, and Favorites [New Data]." Buffer. 13 November. Available online at: http://blog.bufferapp.com/the-power-of-twitters-new-expanded-images-and-how- to-make-the-most-of-it (http://blog.bufferapp.com/the-power-of-twitters-new- expanded-images-and-how-to-make-the-most-of-it) [accessed 13 June 2014]. Elahi, Amina. 2013. "How to Use Image Previews in Tweets to Maximize Marketing Efforts." Sprout Social. 23 December. Available online at: http://sproutsocial.com/insights/use-image-previews-tweets-maximize-marketing- efforts (http://sproutsocial.com/insights/use-image-previews-tweets-maximize- marketing-efforts) [accessed 13 June 2014]. Feinberg, Melanie. 2011. "Personal Expressive Bibliography in the Public Space of Cultural Heritage Institutions." Library Trends 59.4: 588-606. Fitzpatrick, Kathleen. 2012. "Giving It Away: Sharing and the Future of Scholarly Publication." Journal of Scholarly Publishing 43.4: 347-62. www.borrowers.uga.edu/1756/show 22/25 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Holland, Peter. 2009. "Performing Shakespeare for the Web Community." In Shakespeare in Hollywood, Asia, and Cyberspace. Edited by Alexa Huang and Charles S. Ross. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press. 252-62. Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. 2002. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Hosek, Jennifer Ruth. 2008. "Access to Digitized Knowledge: Education, Consolidation, Maintenance." Women in German Yearbook 24: 142-64. Kidnie, Margaret Jane. 2008. "Where is Hamlet? Text, Performance, and Adaptation." In A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance. Edited by Barbara Hodgdon and W. B. Worthen. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell. 101-20. Jenkins, Henry, et al. 2006a. Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century. Chicago: MacArthur Foundation. Jenkins, Henry. 2006b. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press. Jenkins, Henry, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green. 2013. Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture. New York: New York University Press. Lanham, Richard A. 2008. "The Two Markets: Libraries in an Attention Economy." Library Resources and Technical Services 52.2: 3-11. Lanham, Richard A. 2006. The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lanier, Douglas M. 2011. "Post-Textual Shakespeare." In Shakespeare as Cultural Catalyst. Edited by Peter Holland. Special issue of Shakespeare Survey 64: 145-62. Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lévy, Pierre. 1997. Collective Intelligence: Mankind's Emerging World in Cyberspace. Translated by Robert Bononno. Cambridge: Perseus. Li Lan, Yong. 2003. "Shakespeare as Virtual Event." Theatre Research International 28.1: 46-60. Maher, Marshall. 2013. "How to Take Advantage of Twitter's New Inline Images. " Ketchum Blog. 30 October. Available online at: http://blog.ketchum.com/how-to- take-advantage-of-twitters-new-inline-images (http://blog.ketchum.com/how-to- take-advantage-of-twitters-new-inline-images) [accessed 13 June 2014]. Morrison, Aimee. 2014. "Facebook and Coaxed Affordances." In Identity Technologies: Constructing the Self Online. Edited by Anna Poletti and Julie Rak. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. 112-31. Norman, Donald A. 2002. The Design of Everyday Things. New York: Basic Books. Oregon Shakespeare Festival. 2009. Long Range Plan, 2009-2013. Ashland: Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

www.borrowers.uga.edu/1756/show 23/25 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Royal Shakespeare Company. 2014a. "Our Work." Available online at: http://www.rsc.org.uk/about-us/our-work (http://www.rsc.org.uk/about-us/our- work) [accessed 13 June 2014; link no longer operative]. Royal Shakespeare Company. 2014b "Whispers from the Wings." Available online at: https://www.rsc.org.uk/explore/blogs/whispers-from-the-wings/ (https://www.rsc.org.uk/blogs/whispers-from-the-wings) [accessed 28 March 2016]. Rumbold, Kate. 2010. "From 'Access' to 'Creativity': Shakespeare Institutions, New Media, and the Language of Cultural Value." In Shakespeare and New Media. Edited by Katherine Rowe. Special issue of Shakespeare Quarterly 61.3: 313-36. Shakespeare Globe Trust. 2014. "The Globe Today: Our Purpose." Available online at: http://www.shakespearesglobe.com/about-us/todays-globe/purpose (http://www.shakespearesglobe.com/about-us/todays-globe/purpose) [accessed 13 June 2014]. Shoemaker, Pamela J., and Tim P. Vos. 2009. Gatekeeping Theory. New York: Routledge. Stratford Festival. 2014. "Our Mandate." Available online at: http://www.stratfordfestival.ca/about/about.aspx?id=1173 (http://www.stratfordfestival.ca/about/about.aspx?id=1173) [accessed 13 June 2014; link no longer operative]. Taylor, Chris. 2012. "Why Facebook Won't Give you a Straight-Up News Feed." Mashable.com. 14 November. Available online at: http://mashable.com/2012/11/14/no-straight-up-facebook-feed (http://mashable.com/2012/11/14/no-straight-up-facebook-feed) [accessed 13 June 2014]. Van Dijck, José. 2009. "Users Like You? Theorizing Agency in User-Generated Content." Media, Culture, & Society 31.1: 41-58.

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Researching YouTube Shakespeare: Literary Scholars and the Ethical Challenges of (/current) Social Media

VALERIE FAZEL, ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY (/previous)

(/archive)

ABSTRACT

YouTube as a site of research raises ethical issues that have yet to be addressed within Shakespeare studies. Complex debates about whether online communications are private or public underline concerns that previous ethical boundaries, guidelines, and applications of literary and performance research and citation methods may not sufficiently protect the researcher, study subject, or both. This essay examines scholars' responsibility in the research process and dissemination of YouTubers' information within published scholarship. Guidelines recommended by the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) and the Office of Human Research Protection (OHRP) offer matrices for deciding whether or not researchers' ethical priority is in protecting or publishing YouTubers' and/or their commentators' identities in academic publications. These rubrics are put to the test by two YouTube Shakespeare videos as case studies. New media makes it possible to contact Shakespeare video posters and adaptors, prompting the question of whether or not Shakespeareans should cross into this brave new world of participatory research.

Despite the fact that users recognize the overtly public nature of their presentation of self via digital media, this has no universally agreed upon or a priori correspondence with the harm that might eventually be felt. — Annette Markham

Concerns over consent, privacy, and anonymity do not disappear simply because subjects participate in online social networks; rather, they become even more important. — Michael Zimmer

YouTube, the world's most watched video website, reaches a broader, more diverse audience than any other Shakespeare performance medium in history. Although only a relatively small portion of YouTube's ever shifting repository of online videos actively plays a role in perpetuating Shakespeare's cultural legacy, the website marks an important shift in the appropriation and transmission of the dramatist's body of work. As Stephen O'Neill notes, "YouTube is now one of the dominant media through which Shakespeare is iterated, produced and received in the twenty-first century" (O'Neill 2014, 3). Arguably, the Shakespeare artifacts YouTubers produce and view affect the future heritage of Shakespeare performance and reception, although specifically the changes that will arise are as unpredictable now as the advent of the website itself was ten years ago. At this juncture, the cultural phenomenon that is YouTube amasses an ever-shifting corpus of eclectic Shakespeare performances that challenge both existing academic assumptions about temporal and trivialized notions of Shakespeare performance and the fundamental methods of textual research long practiced by literary scholars.

While YouTube is a rich resource for Shakespeare performance and reception studies, this also opens a Pandora's Box of ethical issues that have yet to be addressed within Shakespeare studies. These questions expand beyond previous ethical boundaries, guidelines, and applications of literary and performance analysis. The most prominent matter hinges not only on determining a minimally prescribed code of research ethics entailed in public versus private domains, but also on the moral decision-making literary scholars must now consider as they study "published" materials discovered online. This includes special regard for the people responsible for, and visible within, these works.1 Like many online social media networks (SMNs), YouTube is a public forum, available for open, non-response video viewing or, in other words, lurking. However, users who wish to interact — post videos and/or comments — on the website register for a YouTube account and agree to its terms of publication. Accordingly, the suggestion that researchers consider ethical obligations to individuals briefed on the public nature of SMN postings may already seem to be a defeated argument.2 After all, many YouTubers agree to "broadcast themselves" publicly. Nevertheless, this raises a question that requires special attention: do YouTubers implicitly sign away all control of how their information is shared and used? www.borrowers.uga.edu/1755/show 1/13 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation The issue at hand is not to entertain a discourse on the public nature of YouTube, but to deliberate researchers' responsibility in the research process and dissemination of YouTubers' information within research and published scholarship. The work herein builds on the distinct understanding that YouTubers' personal information and privacy is "less about the information itself and more about the use or flow of that information" in Internet contexts (Markham 2012, 335; emphasis added). As Charles Ess argues, "privacy can be minimally defined as the capacity to control information about oneself" (Ess 2010, 12; emphasis added). Therefore, this essay argues that even when using material from online public realms such as YouTube, researchers in the humanities have a moral obligation to honor individual participants' rights to privacy.

Although researchers' responsibility to protect their study subjects did not originate with Internet technologies, the human element of online SMNs raises distinctive ethical conundrums for both social science and humanities research. Generally speaking, the rapid growth of SMNs outpaces the establishment of research guidelines and recommendations, particularly in the pursuit of ethical qualitative research. Even for social scientists, leaders in online behavior studies, many Internet research decisions rest typically with "the individual agents who both make decisions and act independently of others" (Ess 2010, 17). For the most part, Shakespeareans adhere to the ethical practices prescribed through traditional scholarly literary research skills — developing a research question (who is doing what to Shakespeare on YouTube?), close reading and critical analysis of the videos, and citation of the sources — as the major components of their own online research logic. Recently, however, some Shakespeareans have resorted to assembling customized methodologies and bucking publication protocols in consideration of the humans responsible for SMN artifacts. The issue I underline here is that we humanists may unwittingly place human subjects at risk if we forge ahead with our inquiries and publications, relying on our discipline's text-based citation criteria as our core ethical methodology. With all this ambiguity over Internet research ethics, where does the budding YouTube Shakespeare researcher begin?

A close look at a sample of recent scholarly publications on YouTube Shakespeare reveals several distinct ethical approaches in disseminating YouTuber's online identities. First, Barbara Hodgdon, a self-proclaimed "digital neophyte," works through several YouTube postings and their audience responses in her Shakespeare Bulletin article, "(You)Tube Travel: The 9:59 to Dover Beach, Stopping at Fair Verona and Elsinore" (2010, 313). Her engaging analyses of both YouTube Shakespeare performance videos and the interactive conversations that take place on the video's interface follow the ethical guidelines of literary publication: she includes full citation of all her sources, albeit none of which arguably evince potential risk of harm now for the individuals cited. While neither the essay nor its paratext includes information about methodology in contacting the individuals she cites, by describing YouTube as a "public sphere" that offers "new frameworks of accessibility and circulation," the implication is that YouTube serves researchers as a public text in the same vein as Shakespeare on film or on the stage (Hodgdon 2010, 314). Alternatively, the methodology Stephen O'Neill employs in his book, Shakespeare and YouTube: New Media Forms of the Bard, practices a mode of informed consent by first sending via YouTube a message to the username "attached to the video [requesting] permission to discuss the video as part of an academic monograph" (O'Neill 2014, 240). In cases of no response from the YouTubers, or when the video featured minors, O'Neill omits usernames and video URLs within his work (2014, 241). Even though SMNs like YouTube fall under fair use, O'Neill's decision to seek informed consent demonstrates his consideration of YouTubers' expressed permission in order to identify them or their work in his publication.3

Another case in point: Ayanna Thompson's 2010 Shakespeare Quarterly article, "Unmooring the Moor: Researching and Teaching on YouTube," intentionally excludes all video titles and participant names. In her work exploring minors' racialized adaptations of Shakespeare, she intentionally goes against literary citation protocol for the sake of protecting the identities of the students in the YouTube videos and comments she analyzes, stating clearly, "I do not cite specific URLs or usernames" (Thompson 2010, 340). This decision engenders a different set of ethical complications, including responsibility to other scholars who may wish to review her sources. Finally, the editors of this publication, Borrowers and Lenders, provide researchers with recommended "common sense" guidelines for the inclusion of videos within its publications and citations (see Appendix I). These guidelines take into consideration the legal implications that at present are more inclined to include all publicly available information, with the exception of the YouTube URLs and usernames of minors. These examples show that each Shakespeare researcher employs a mode of citation that exemplifies what Ess decribes as phronesis. But is it possible or even necessary to establish more definitive guidelines?

Evoking Aristole, Charles Ess uses the term phronesis to refer to this form of ethical decision-making, the practical judgment about how to respond best to specific choices in specific circumstances, whereby researchers make independent decisions about the ethical methodologies they employ in their research based on their own training and experience (see 2010, 25). Phronesis requires, as Ess argues, "experience — both of successes and failures — as these help us learn (often, the hard way) what 'works' (is relevant) ethically and what doesn't" (Ess 2010, 25). For those of us engaged in online humanities research, particularly in the study of SMNs, our literary-based training and our individual, albeit conscientious, experiences with online inquiries become the basis that informs our practical judgment or phronesis, our research ethics. Nevertheless, decisions based on our phronesis may contradict our ethical responsibility to make transparent our sources, and thus yield methodologies fraught with ambiguity, uncertainty, and inconsistency.

While academic bodies such as the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) strive to advance concrete methodological guidelines for ethical research practices, the above examples also demonstrate that, for humanities scholars, online research ambiguities still abound. Internet researchers in general commonly confront the daunting task of determining "how far traditional ethical frameworks may — and may not — successfully resolve the issues evoked by digital media and their new possibilities for communication, human interaction, and so forth" (Ess 2010, 19). For instance, even when "multiple actors and agents" classify a website like YouTube as public (as many Internet scholars currently do), such designation does not necessarily efface the "complications associated with determining moral or legal parameters for protecting" some of YouTube Shakespeare's participants (Ess 2010, 17; Markham and Baym 2009, xviii). If anything, www.borrowers.uga.edu/1755/show 2/13 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation as the above epigram from Michael Zimmer suggests, concerns about Internet research that entails human participants are "even more important" because most online SMNs function as open spaces where the lines between private and public (sharable) information are especially blurred (Zimmer 2010, 324).

This essay illustrates some of the ethical complications Shakespeareans encounter when researching YouTube Shakespeares, and returns periodically to two particular YouTube videos, "Crank that Shakespeare" and "Hamlet ST.," as test cases for these complexities.4" Crank that Shakespeare," an original Hamlet performance video posted on YouTube in March 2008, features five students enacting, through rap and action, an abridged version of Shakespeare's Hamlet. The students, white males dressed in an array of gendered costumes and wigs, dance, sing, and enact Hamlet both inside and outside an American home. The video opens with a pair of two-second shots of a pocket watch and a Cadillac emblem, followed by a medium shot of two young men seated in a car as they bop to the rhythm of non-diegetic rap music. The student closest to the camera, seated in the driver's seat, wears mirrored sunglasses, a winter jacket, and a striped ski cap: he performs the video's Hamlet. Further back in the shot, another student sits in the passenger seat, brandishing a miniature human skull in his right hand: this student, viewers soon discover, is impersonating Shakespeare (and several other characters throughout the video). The intertitle, reminiscent of MTV's music videos, pops up on the bottom left corner of the screen and reads: Crank that Shakespeare JCJB AP English Production5 The rap's lyrics begin with a cacophony of rap-style barking, hooting, and "Shakespeare!" howled in a sports-game chant. As the video runs through its two-minute rap performance (with the lyrics scrolling across the bottom of the screen), the students hyper-act Hamlet's surprise, fear, and uncertainty as he encounters various characters from Shakespeare's play. In addition, the video returns twice to the students in the car as they rap, "Hamlet here — with my boy Shakespeare! Hamlet here — with my boy Shakespeare!"

"Hamlet ST.," an original Hamlet performance video jointly produced by high school performing arts student AB and budding filmmaker YZ, features AB performing Hamlet's act 2, scene 2 soliloquy ("The play's the thing") on an empty, derelict lot in Camden, New Jersey.6 AB, an African American dressed casually in a baggy tee-shirt, plaid shorts, and canvas boat shoes, looks straight at the camera, grins beguilingly, and after introducing himself, launches boisterously into Hamlet's oft-quoted speech. YZ's full body shot of AB stays focused on the actor's movements, while the mise-en-scène — the abandoned "crackhouse" with boarded windows to AB's left, the weed and garbage-strewn dirt lot, and non-diegetic sounds of vehicles and people behind the camera — speak volumes about AB's local circumstances.7 AB's YouTube Shakespeare has the characteristics of a video audition, albeit one by an actor whose race, likability, and home turf is as much a part of the performance as Shakespeare's words.8

"Crank That Shakespeare" and "Hamlet ST." serve as the kinds of vernacular YouTube Shakespeares that some scholars have been using in their cultural studies-based research. That is, these videos reveal a great deal about the cultural work "Shakespeare" performs in contemporary youth society and, thus, provide a rich text for humanities-based analysis. Like scholars of the humanities in general, Shakespeareans look at the ways the dramatist's texts have been read, interpreted, performed, and adapted socially, historically, and culturally, examining not only the particular context(s) of the text's original production and creation, but also its reception and recreations throughout history. Specifically, Shakespeareans focus on minuscule details of a text, paying particular attention to the detailed qualities, the nuances that make it unique.9 As such, "Crank That Shakespeare" and "Hamlet ST." represent distinctive works that a popular culture Shakespeare scholar would adore: collectively, the videos include a canonical text, colorblind and gendered performances, contemporary adaptation, "identity tourism," hip hop, documentable responses (participatory commentary), and contemporary pedagogical practices, to name only a few of the cultural issues raised.10

This essay features "Crank That Shakespeare" and "Hamlet ST." for a number of reasons, beginning with the way they exemplify the potentially viral nature of YouTube videos. As Michael Strangelove suggests, "YouTube videos rapidly migrate across the Internet population because Internet users tend to share what they find with their friends" (2010, 11). "Crank That Shakespeare" was uploaded to YouTube and labeled as the fulfillment of a school assignment, whereas "Hamlet ST." was uploaded to YouTube and labeled as the onset of YZ's documentary series of young Americans. Both have been hyperlinked to multiple other websites (including one geared towards Shakespeareans, BardBox, discussed at length below). To date, "Crank That Shakespeare" has reached nearly 12,000 views, whereas AB/YZ's production has reached nearly half a million viewings. Both videos have extended beyond their producers' expectations and have spread from site to site without their explicit approval. In other words, they each have become viral.11

The viral movement of both "Crank That Shakespeare" and "Hamlet ST." highlights one of many quandaries for Shakespeareans interested in the intersections of cultural studies, performance studies, Shakespeare studies, and digital media studies. Are we Shakespeare scholars equipped to deal with what Henry Jenkins calls the "brains of individual [media] consumers" and producers (2006, 3): that is, the real people who actually create, consume, and share Internet videos? What new skills do we need to develop in order to play a key role in the framework of evaluation, which is so important to the scholarly experience of YouTube Shakespeares? For the past few decades, Shakespeareans have enjoyed the luxury of Shakespeare film libraries, moving image performances that we have been trained to read as texts.12 Often, online Shakespeares — like the countless number on YouTube — are not sheltered (and nurtured) under the same legal, moral, and publicity umbrellas that protect professionally distributed productions, i.e., "texts," on which many Shakespeareans were inculcated. Shakespeareans also view personal interviews with directors, actors, other Shakespeareans, and the like as "texts"; in other words, a considerable range of excellent Shakespeare scholars have seldom worked under the guidelines that categorize human subject research.13 Herein lies the larger question: when should YouTube Shakespeares be considered "as 'text' and when as the communications www.borrowers.uga.edu/1755/show 3/13 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation of a 'living person' for whom a different set of ethical considerations apply?" (McKee and Porter 2009, 5). Even if YouTube Shakespeares are determined to be "published" texts — that is, networked digital objects of Shakespeare's works that are viewable by everyone, not blocked to anyone who has the technological means — might other considerations overrule established codes of research conduct?

While scholars in the humanities often treat Internet sources as digital objects or texts, subject to academic scrutiny and sharing, the young men in both "Crank That Shakespeare" and "Hamlet ST." are not texts. In fact, the performers in the otherwise innocuous "Crank That Shakespeare" appear to be minors, under-age students creating a video for their "AP English" class. As the students are (possibly) still legally categorized as children, I have to wonder if they deserve special consideration beyond YouTube's legal guidelines. Likewise, but in a different vein, "Hamlet ST." has generated thousands of viewer comments, overall a rich resource for reception studies. However, a fair number include racial insults, ethnic slurs, social slams, and degrading remarks about AB, his skill as an actor, and his hometown. As Susan Barnes notes, "Internet users frequently forget that their message can be accessed by others without their knowledge"; therefore, people who post comments may or may not be aware their remarks can be used as published material and therefore appear in other media (2004, 212).14 They may not even consider that their comment may also be read by thousands of YouTube users who merely "lurk or only read messages" (Barnes 2004, 207).15 While these messages or comments may or may not be traced to their "real" world identity now, what later risks might be generated now through the capture and archiving of their online identities in a scholarly publication? Clearly, there are ethical and methodological issues involved in approaching YouTube Shakespeares' entire framework that literary and humanity discourses in general are not currently designed to address, but where specifically do we draw a line between permissible and permission-advised public research? Internet researcher Carrie James argues that "ethics are tightly aligned with the responsibilities to and for others that are attached to one's role" as researcher and critic; "[a]t the heart of ethics," she continues, "is responsibility to others with whom one interacts through various roles" (James et al. 2008, 9). Analyzing the tasks entailed in YouTube Shakespeare research, the remainder of this article interrogates whether or not this same "heart" of responsibility applies to Shakespeare scholars who perform research on socially driven Internet platforms like YouTube.

Although unintentional ethical lapses can occur in any research project, identifiable lapses confound even the most conscientious Shakespeare scholar because, as demonstrated by the conscientious examples of YouTube Shakespeare research above, our discipline has not fully developed and/or specifically articulated Internet research guidelines.16 However, it is important to note that these lapses are not uniquely Shakespearean or humanities-based. As James et al. note, "the frontier-like quality of the new digital media [including YouTube as text] means that opportunities for ethical lapses abound," even as scholars willingly enter the ongoing debates (2008, 6). Charles Ess points out that "our first efforts to grapple with difficult ethical issues that require phronesis do not always go well" (Ess 2010, 25). In other words, even when the lapses are known, and even when scholars are sensitive to ethical obligations, Shakespeareans and other literary scholars must employ the acts of remix and become bricoleurs as they forge ahead, "piecing together new research tools [and] fitting old methods to new problems," precisely because their methodologies are not entirely suitable for digital resources (Denzin 2004, 2).17 While bricolage is hardly a new phenomenon in literary study — intertextuality most saliently evinces this — what impact might individual assemblage of ethical approaches to research and citation protocols have on our field of study? Should our worries of adhering to systemic conventions outweigh our concern for the humans implicated in online artifacts?

The concern that Shakespeare scholars may be (un)wittingly implicated in ethical lapses propels a plethora of interrelated questions: should (or can) Shakespeareans approach Internet research in the same manner as textual research, or do we need to develop new theoretical, methodological, and interpretative lenses to perform humanities-based Internet research? More specifically, if we read YouTube clips as texts, are we effacing the rights of the individuals within the performance? What about the rights of those who post comments? Do YouTube texts fall into the category of "human subjects research"? How does, or how should, moral responsibility extend to the human subjects located on Internet sites? When should privacy, and therefore protection, be a concern when citing sources found on YouTube? If so, how exactly do we identify which materials we are morally obligated to protect in our work on YouTube? And, more important, how are issues of protection and privacy further complicated when the online subjects are minors? Finally, Shakespeare scholars need to address the burgeoning interactive capability of Internet research. This includes reading, analyzing, and including participant responses and exchanges in our work, as I demonstrate with "Hamlet ST." below. Participant responses potentially offer reception study material; yet how do we define these YouTube comments? As public text? As public qualitative data? As intellectual material belonging to the commentators? YouTube's community guidelines are relevant within the realms of SMNs, but they lack sufficiency in providing guidelines for literary research and publication.18 More important, with the potential to practice as a participant — a commentator on YouTube's interface — the boundaries between the researcher as reader and as participant become contested sites for defining research protocol. For instance, YouTube's interactive affordances, such as the interface's comment boxes and the ability to send private messages to YouTubers, create the potential to "interview" YouTube Shakespeare participants.19 Should we Shakespeare scholars move beyond our propensity merely to analyze YouTube Shakespeares, or should we become involved in an exchange of information — in dialogues or even in collaborations — with Internet producers/performers as part of our research?

The remainder of this essay looks at some common research ambiguities that Shakespeare scholars face when encountering humans in YouTube videos. It begins with a particular focus on "Crank That Shakespeare" and the complications of researching videos that possibly include minors before discussing some of the potential issues a YouTube Shakespeare reception study of "Hamlet ST." might galvanize. It then overviews social science approaches to these dilemmas before leading to a discussion of the potential for humanistic participatory research.

"CRANK THAT SHAKESPEARE" TRAVELS THE VIRTUAL GLOBE www.borrowers.uga.edu/1755/show 4/13 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation "Crank That Shakespeare" first came to my attention through BardBox, a blog actively administered from 2008-2012 by British film scholar Luke McKernan.20 Dismissing early notions that YouTube Shakespeares are "home only to facetious and repetitive parodies," McKernan aggregated over 150 Shakespeare-related videos, arguing that the best examples needed "to be identified, championed and studied" (McKernan 2008a).21 Specifically collecting "original Shakespeare-related videos," rather than the common, and popular, Shakespeare mash-ups derived from a whole host of other media (cinema, television, DVD), BardBox clearly targets as its audience scholars in the humanities who engage with pop-culture Shakespeares. McKernan's stated goal is to "look beyond YouTube as a distributor of pre-existing content (whether legally or illegally) and to uncover the best of the creative work that can be found there . . . a different kind of filmed Shakespeare" (McKernan 2008a). The videos can be viewed on-site or through the YouTube link McKernan posts under each video window. As on YouTube pages, BardBox enables conversation about each of the videos, as well as the blog as a whole, through viewer response comments.

As administrator (or self-titled producer), McKernan is careful to cite and acknowledge the origin of each YouTube video he includes on the blog. He re-categorizes them for BardBox users, noting that each BardBox video is named either after the on-screen title of the video or the title it is given on YouTube, and comprises the video itself, date (the date of posting if actual production date not known), credits (where available), cast (ditto) and duration, description with comment, plus link to its YouTube (or other) page. Each post is described under a variety of categories and tagged under the name of the relevant play. (McKernan 2008a) In addition to categorizing and cataloging, McKernan summarizes and very briefly analyzes each Shakespeare video he adds to BardBox. In his summary analysis of "Crank That Shakespeare," for instance, McKernan acknowledges the ubiquity, and often the banality, of American school projects on Shakespeare: It is all too easy to sigh at yet another American middle school English project where the class has been encouraged to demonstrate that Shakspeare [sic] can be fun by producing a YouTube video. (McKernan 2008b) Yet he urges his blog audience to "[l]ook again" at "Crank," stating that This is a terrific video. It displays such enthusiasm for the task in hand, which is to make a rap video out of the story of Hamlet. The lyrics are sharp, the editing is good, the music is strong, and the performances are goofy but dedicated to the cause . . . [i]t's a fine English project that brings out such delight in recognizing the vitality of the play. (McKernan 2008b) McKernan's fascinating blog brings into focus several pertinent issues related to the ethics of humanities-based Internet research. Like many Shakespeareans who have turned to the Internet, McKernan expresses his excitement about the sheer potential of YouTube as a research resource. Like many humanities scholars, he demonstrates a concentrated interest in details of the videos as cultural artifacts, as testimony to users' engagements with Shakespeare. Yet while he re-categorizes, summarizes, and critically comments on "Crank That Shakespeare," he makes no remarks about the ethics of using, viewing, and posting what may be the use and exposure of minors. Instead, like most conscientious humanities scholars, he carefully includes the names of all the artists who are credited on the YouTube site.

Herein are raised larger and more specific questions for all who use YouTube (and other Internet video) material in humanistic research. "Crank That Shakespeare" appears to be produced by minors, yet they list their full names on the original YouTube installation, and those names are repeated on BardBox. Given that YouTube videos are networked digital objects that frequently get shared across multiple social media platforms, should BardBox be responsible to get permission to cite this specific video (from the minors? from their parents or guardians?)? Because some of the producers may be minors, is it ethical for BardBox to list their names? For that matter, is it ethical for me to cite BardBox, citing their names? Furthermore, "Crank That Shakespeare" is labeled as a project that fulfills a school assignment; this illustrates (as mentioned above) that the producers had a specific audience in mind when they uploaded the video. In other words, what was once a fun school assignment became viral: "Crank That Shakespeare" has extended beyond its producers' expectations and has spread from site to site.22 At one point, statistics on YouTube indicated that this video is hyperlinked to five other websites, exclusive of BardBox, which does not show up on the "Crank That Shakespeare" YouTube page as a hyperlink.23 This all suggests that "Crank That Shakespeare" may be hyperlinked and copied to other unknowable — and perhaps untraceable — websites and personal computers. As Patricia Lange notes, "when a link to one's [YouTube] video is not displayed, a video maker may not know where and in what context [his/]her videos are being posted" (Lange 2008, 89). What this also indicates is that even if "Crank That Shakespeare" disappears from YouTube, it could potentially reappear elsewhere someday. Therefore, while BardBox functions to filter YouTube videos for Shakespeareans, and while the availability to locate this video on multiple sites potentially suggests its "public" status, does BardBox (do I?) still have a moral obligation to inform the producers of the newly created, never imagined link?24

At the risk of setting up "Crank That Shakespeare" on BardBox as a "red herring" (after all, most researchers, including me, would be compelled to ask, "What is wrong with BardBox's posting this hyperlink? It originally appears on a 'published' website that allows minors aged thirteen to eighteen years old to post!"), this particular example illustrates the ease of Internet video appropriation or poaching, the alarming ways Internet videos are virally disseminated, and the ethical significance these sharing practices might have for the human participants in the videos. In addition, it reveals a more general question about genre and authorship: is a YouTube video merely a text — a product that is completely separate from its creator — or do its transitory properties, controllable in some ways by the producer, make it something more personal?25

www.borrowers.uga.edu/1755/show 5/13 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation "Hamlet ST." presents a different but related set of issues. While also part of BardBox's collection, the ethical issues hinge on the sensitive content of some participatory responses (visible on YouTube but unseen on BardBox).26 Such comments could be valuable as research material because they illuminate audience responses to the cultural phenomenon that is Shakespeare's body of work as it is performed in informal conditions. Many participants use avatars, anonymous usernames, or pseudonyms, but have channel profiles that could potentially identify them in the real world. While participant comments are made public by the posters themselves (one does not need to sign in to view YouTube videos or the videos' entire interface), the ethical dilemmas return back to the researcher. Should researchers protect participants who publish sensitive comments on YouTube?27 If so, what strategies do we use to protect these sources and still appear credible in our own work? After all, Shakespeareans publish their own studies under the conventions of peer review. As Ayanna Thompson notes, "Our work is often assessed by another's ability to verify such citations and to explore the text in question for him/herself" (Thompson 2011, 149). Not "providing full citations" makes resources that support the work unpeer-reviewable and also runs contrary to the logic of Web 2.0; after all, the hyperlink as digital object (and citation) can be distributed across devices and platforms, a potentially exciting prospect for online Shakespeare researchers (Thompson 2011, 149). On the other hand, if we have no obligation to protect participants (because of the public nature of YouTube's forum), then what future implications might Shakespeareans need to consider as we, in turn, republish and cite sensitive materials as they appear now on YouTube, risking that they might be later removed by the participants for their own protection?

WEIRD (SOCIAL) SCIENCE? While these types of ethical and methodological questions are not yet addressed by Shakespeare and other humanities scholars, they have been the focus of Internet researchers since the 1990s. Annette Markham and Nancy Baym, for instance, argue that the rapid shift in media phenomena "brings into sharp relief previously assumed and invisible epistemologies and practices of inquiry" (Markham and Baym 2008, vii). Markham's collaborations with Baym, and her continuing solo inquiries on Internet ethics, serve as examples of the kinds of concerns — for instance, the protection of privacy and personal information — that the Internet researcher community has addressed for over a decade. Shakespeareans, however, have a shorter history of Internet scholarship. Nevertheless, the same concerns that Markham, Baym, Ess and others tackle should be echoed by Shakespeareans in their analyses of literary adaptions and appropriations found online. How shall we begin to set up research guidelines for the specific humanistic practice of close, critical analyses of YouTube Shakespeare videos? What should we borrow from the social sciences, and of that, what should we alter? Clearly the paradigms that have governed our own literary theories will necessarily undergo reshaping — what can we afford to discard on the wayside (disclosure) and to what must we hold fast (salient value of the research)?

For a start, it is important to note that human performers are elements of many Shakespeare-based YouTube videos. When most social scientists work face-to-face with human research subjects, they recognize they have an ethical and often legal obligation to consider an individual's right to privacy, intellectual ownership, and informed consent. Therefore, the ethical issues that Shakespeareans have traditionally faced have been tied to an ethical responsibility to the text, even when the text is broadly conceived as image, word, sound, etc. In this approach, Shakespeare scholars do not have an ethical responsibility to the human subject(s) within the text. Little additional consideration about age, sexuality, and/or gender has been necessary within humanistic analyses of texts. For instance, a number of critical evaluations of Kenneth Branagh's 1989 film Henry V commented on the character, Boy, performed by the then-pubescent actor Christian Bale, who was fifteen when the film was released. In those cases, Bale as an actor in a public format was considered to be part of the film that could and should be analyzed (e.g., his role in the film, his performance, and his appearance). Does this same freedom and impunity function for YouTube videos? A look at a couple of recent studies of minors' activities on the Internet illustrates how social scientists address the ethical dimensions of these practices.

In their 2008 publication under Harvard's GoodWork Project Report Series, Carrie James's team of social scientists examines the opportunities and risks that young people encounter through digital technologies, including "uploading and sharing their own creations" (James et al. 2008, 2). In five case studies, James and her team examine how young people understand and practice ethical Internet participatory behavior. Within this work, James's group identifies the broad critical issues at stake, such as "identity, privacy, ownership and authorship, credibility and participation" (James et al. 2008, 2). While these same issues have been matters of concern for many researchers of offline materials, and while some of GoodWork's evaluation focuses on the participants' published Internet texts, the contributors cite the individuals neither in their reports nor in the Works Cited, even though only two of the five studies involve minors. This suggests that while the subjects were used for GoodWork's study, their identities remain protected by James et al. and concealed from readers. Virginia Kuhn affirms this ethic of protecting identities by not citing them as sources. In addressing digital fair use citation issues in relation to copyright specifically, Kuhn's comments validate James's move to protect the GoodWork participants. In the pursuit of critical evaluation or as a means to educate, Kuhn states, "[i]f there is some kind of justification or rationale for why someone is doing what they're doing," then not citing the source is appropriate (Kuhn 2008). In other words, both James and Kuhn suggest that new approaches to Internet research necessarily revise non-digital textual research methodologies. If it is in the best interest to override citation protocol for the sake of protecting a subject's identity, then superseding the protocol becomes the ethical solution. For many Shakespeare scholars, however, not citing sources goes against the traditional grain of literary research and analysis. Thus, it is important that as scholars, we begin to develop (and accept) new theoretical, methodological and interpretative lenses that enable us to undertake literary-based research of Internet texts, and to do so on a case-by-case basis.

Anticipating ethical concerns, the Association of Internet Researchers published recommendations in 2002, which were updated in 2012, on the ethics of Internet research in order to "clarify and resolve at least many of the more common ethical difficulties" by "providing general principles [that] algorithmically deduce the correct answer" (Ess 2002, 3).28 In other words, the AoIR guidelines, while not www.borrowers.uga.edu/1755/show 6/13 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation advocating "ethical relativism," conclude that "doing the right thing, for the right reason, in the right way, at the right time" is matter of contextual and researcher judgment, or phronesis (Ess 2002, 4).29 The Office of Human Research Protections (OHRP) offers a similar system of decision charts to help researchers determine appropriate and legal research methodologies. Despite the fact that Ess and company imagined that the recommendations would be employed in the "social sciences and humanities," scholars in literary studies are not accustomed to applying methods "algorithmically" (Ess 2002, 1). To my knowledge there are no algorithms or ethical flow charts in humanities-based methodologies, although it is likely that they will develop as increasingly more digital humanists explore SMNs. For now it is important for Shakespeare scholars to think through the AoIR algorithm and OHRP decision charts to see if we can apply, adapt, and/or appropriate them to humanistic approaches to Internet research. As an example, I apply them below to "Crank That Shakespeare" and "Hamlet ST." (see Appendix II).

The first question is one of venue: both "Crank That Shakespeare" and "Hamlet ST." are available on YouTube, an open and public forum to all those who have access to online media. According to AoIR, "the greater the acknowledged publicity of the venue, the less obligation there may be to protect individual privacy, confidentiality, [and the] right to informed consent" (Ess 2002, 5). YouTube's terms of agreement confirm that viewers can watch videos on YouTube without registering for a YouTube account; it is a highly public forum.

Still, one must ask, even if YouTube is publicly accessible, should the postings (the videos, comments, and the people who make them) be read as texts? Or, are the individuals performing in "Crank That Shakespeare" or the participants responding to "Hamlet ST." categorized as "human subjects research?" According to the complex charting system established by OHRP in 2004, "Crank That Shakespeare" and "Hamlet ST." are not categorized as human subjects research because most Shakespeare scholars who critically view and analyze the videos as sources are not interceding or interacting with the performers and producers. Yet, even though "Crank That Shakespeare" and "Hamlet ST." are public texts and not technically categorized as human subjects research, using them in one's research (or, using them as research) is still ethically complicated because "Crank That Shakespeare" maybe is performed and produced by minors, and "Hamlet ST." contains sensitive responses that may someday implicate the participants or researchers in unpredictable ways.

Debates about whether online communications are private or public are necessarily complex; these debates are further complicated when one asks whether minors, and YouTube video participants at large, have the capacity to understand the public nature of the Internet. YouTube's own policy regarding children and minors is that no one under the age of thirteen can obtain a YouTube account, but this does not speak to children who are included in the accounts and postings of their legal guardians (or in anyone else's, for that matter).30 Things would be even more complicated if "Crank That Shakespeare" contained an eight-year-old in the background; that is, an under- aged third party who could not control whether s/he is included in the online posting. OHRP's rubric suggests that research of minors like those in "Crank That Shakespeare" is legally permissible as the minors are, first of all, being observed participating in "public behavior," even though they can be identified by name or "identifiers linked to the subject" ("Decision Charts" 2013). OHRP draws the line when citing a posting "that places the subjects at risk of criminal or civil liability or [is] damaging to subjects' financial status, employability, or reputation" ("Decision Charts" 2013). None of the behavior exhibited in "Crank That Shakespeare" places the individuals at risk of legal liability (unlike, say, videos that include the consumption of illegal substances), and it is hard to imagine that the video could harm the participants' reputations (unlike, say, videos that include nudity, sexual acts, violent acts, etc.). But is this equally true about responder commentary on "Hamlet ST."? Although commentary is decreed to be "public" text, republishing racialized commentary seals the connection between comment and commentator elsewhere other than the ephemeral setting of YouTube. In other words, Shakespeareans can legally use "Crank That Shakespeare" because it does not endanger the participants' status in either public or private realms. But should they? And do the same OHRP notions of protection and liability apply towards sensitive participatory commentary in "Hamlet ST."?

Even though it is legally permissible to use minors and others in public texts under these conditions, and even though YouTube's participatory commentary is considered published material, AoIR notes that researchers have a "heightened" moral obligation to protect under-aged research subjects and those whose public postings may cause harm or embarrassment. Minors present "special difficulties as they inhabit something of an [ethical] middle ground" (Ess 2002, 5). Yet, they are "highly engaged" with digital media, often "uploading and sharing their own creations" (James et al. 2008, 2).31 In fact, they often appear more fully cognizant of web culture than are their parents and teachers. James notes that, "indeed, many young people are using the digital media in impressive and socially responsible ways" (James et al. 2008, 3). Of course, this is precisely why so many Shakespeare teachers encourage their students to create performance videos for the Internet: these assignments are meant to entice students to connect canonical texts to the contemporary moment. If minors are using digital media in sophisticated and "socially responsible ways," then it is also likely that they are aware of the potential viral transmission of their work (James et al. 2008, 3). Zman, the producer of "Crank That Shakespeare," might very well have understood the potential viral dissemination of his YouTube posting. Yet how can researchers be sure without asking? And this takes me to the brave (but not so new) world of participatory research.

TO PARTICIPATE OR NOT TO PARTICIPATE? My engagement with "Crank That Shakespeare" provokes a number of questions that I would like to ask its uploader, zman. What exactly was the "AP English" assignment: a performance, a video, an online posting? Why did he post it on YouTube? Were all of the participants informed of, and agreeable to, this posting? Did the assignment encourage the students to update Hamlet specifically? Why is it a rap? What is it about Hamlet that invited a rap rendition? What feedback did the "AP English" teacher eventually give them? What feedback did their peers give them? What do they think about the online commentary their clip has generated? Are they aware that "Crank That Shakespeare" is posted on BardBox? Are they aware that YouTube postings can be viral — that they can be posted on www.borrowers.uga.edu/1755/show 7/13 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation myriad other websites through hyperlinks? Are they aware that digital tools enable YouTube users to capture the video on their own personal computers? How do they feel about researchers not only citing, but also analyzing their video? What is their engagement with Shakespeare now? If they had the chance, would they create a different video (or not post it online at all)?

Of course, I have just as many questions for the teacher who taught this "AP English" class because s/he may play an equally central role in the production of this video. One might even refer to the teacher as another producer/author, one whose views and visions could be radically different from the ones presented in the online video. So what was the goal of the assignment? Why was it constructed in this way? How did the Internet figure into her/his construction of the assignment? What were the rubrics for grading? Is there a follow up to the assignment that addresses the (often) critical comments and questions posted to the videos? Teachers have an ethical responsibility to make students cognizant that their online and therefore "public posts may be taken up and analyzed in a variety of ways" and by a variety of people, including McKernan or me (Black 2008, 23). Was this ethical responsibility considered during the planning of the initial assignment? I have a number of questions I would like to ask AB and his videographer YZ, who both seem open to interviews. In other words, I am interested in asking questions that would reveal a richer context not only for the videos' production and afterlife, but also for the producers/authors as individuals (even as individuals with potentially competing and conflicting interests). Clearly, such inquiries move more precisely into mode of human subjects research.

However, because interaction with producers/authors rarely occurs in literary-based research, I have no models to follow. I have scrutinized the spaces surrounding the video performance, including other hyperlinks. Like many thorough researchers, I hunted down leads and followed sources that took me beyond the video. For example, I found several AB and YZ television interviews posted by the duo's fans on YouTube that further explain the genealogy of "Hamlet ST." I discovered that zman and several others in "Crank That Shakespeare" have Myspace accounts, several of which are available for public viewing (zman's is private). Through these sources I have been able to figure out the participants' ages, hometown, and school. However, my more pressing questions about the context of the video are left unanswered. In other words, I know how to read and interpret the videos and their responses as texts — historical and social artifacts that both reflect and create their cultural environment — but these readings seem incomplete with the knowledge that the authors are not dead, literally or figuratively, and through the medium of YouTube, very likely contactable.

After all, YouTube, the very website zman and AB/YZ employ encourages interactivity. Viewers are invited to post comments and links to related videos on YouTubers' walls, and YouTube categorizes and links certain postings precisely to enable interactivity. Likewise, BardBox's curation of both performance videos encourages interactivity (even though BardBox includes neither the textual nor visual responses or comments originally posted on YouTube: another methodological decision that has significant ethical dimensions). As Kathleen LeBesco notes, Historically, ethnographic researchers have been drawn to discourse communities in order to gain a better understanding of the meanings that community members generate through conversation . . . critical ethnographers find themselves especially interested in the world of online discourse communities, where they have interpretive access to participants and conversations that might be otherwise restricted in the real world. (LeBesco 2004, 63) Yet, as humanities scholars, we Shakespeareans may hesitate to engage with YouTubers precisely because we have not been trained to do so. I have neither posted comments or questions on YouTube or BardBox, nor have I "friended" zman through Myspace. But should I? Could I? What is the protocol for conducting participatory work in the humanities?

Historically, studies affirm that participatory cultures found on the Internet are more democratic and less "top-down" than traditional media models. In addition, these studies reveal that a "collective intelligence" is created in participatory cultures. For instance, Henry Jenkins argues that a participatory culture has Relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one's creations, and some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices. A participatory culture is also one in which members believe their contributions matter, and feel some degree of social connection with one another (at the least they care what other people think about what they have created). (Jenkins 2006, 3) Furthermore, James Gee argues that participation in digital practices — what he labels digital literacies — provides students (and others) the opportunity for "gaining situated rather than merely verbal (or literal) meanings for concepts, processes and functions" (quoted in Lankshear and Knobel 2008, 13; emphasis in original). Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel argue that digital literacy practices, such as those manifested in "Crank That Shakespeare" and, to a lesser extent, the performance and production of "Hamlet ST.," [m]ark the difference between merely being able to parrot back content (which may be good enough for passing school tests, but not for performing with distinction in real world tasks) and attaining sound theoretical understandings. (Lankshear and Knobel 2008, 13) In other words, the assignment that zman and his classmates received may have encouraged a type of collective experience that could enable attaining the "sound theoretical understandings" that Lankshear and Knobel argue occur. The assignment, after all, seems to bridge traditional and new pedagogical practices, such as close reading, analysis, translation, and transference. For Shakespeare scholars to proceed as if Internet materials are merely digital objects to be shared or texts for analysis is to deny the power of a participatory culture in which there is a "connection" to the producers and users, a sense of responsibility to their opinions about their creations, and a belief that intelligence is dynamic and collective. While some may be content with this denial, I suspect many others will be deeply uncomfortable with it. www.borrowers.uga.edu/1755/show 8/13 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation As contemporary adaptations of Shakespeare, "Crank That Shakespeare" and "Hamlet ST." illustrate the myriad ways in which this material continues and ruptures our understanding of Shakespearean performance-based methodologies. Despite the fact that the videos can be read, interpreted, and analyzed in old and familiar literary discourses, their medium of access constantly signals ruptures with the past: their interactive interface constantly reminds us that the producers, authors, and creators are not only alive, but also responsive to posted comments and direct communication.

Although it is clear that conducting participatory research changes the ethical concerns and methodological practices for Shakespeare scholars using Internet sources, it should also be clear that not interacting with the producers, authors, and creators of online material also impacts ethical concerns and methodological practices. While the concerns and practices may not be exactly the same, neither decision is a neutral stance: neither methodological practice is without complication. To engage with the producers of "Crank That Shakespeare" and/or "Hamlet ST." would necessitate new methodologies, and not engaging with the producers also challenges and alters old methodologies. For those of us in Shakespearean culture studies who use (or are eager to use) YouTube and other potentially interactive texts as research materials, the course is not easy or clear, but we must be willing engage in such debates explicitly.

Ultimately, I decided to reach out and engage in dialogue with the producers of the Shakespeare performance videos that serve as case studies in this essay. I first developed an interview strategy, then sought (and was granted) approval from my institution's IRB, The Office of Research Integrity and Assurance, to contact a selection of YouTube Shakespeare channel hosts. My goal, beyond seeking answers to the pressing questions that Shakespeare production in social media engender, was to explore the potentiality of developing a dialogue about Shakespeare production with the YouTube Shakespeare video participants. In addition, I felt the need to test what online ethnographic research might yield in terms of knowledge production. Using YouTube's message capabilities as the locus for first contact, I sent emails to the channel hosts of the two case studies I include in this essay. The uploader of "Hamlet ST." did not reply. Almost immediately, zman of "Crank That Shakespeare" consented to participate in my larger study (results forthcoming). Exchanging dialogue with zman proved rewarding on many levels, not least because I feel comfortable in including, with impunity, the hyperlink to "Crank That Shakespeare" within this publication.

What emerges from these few examples is that participatory research can be daunting for even the most willing Shakespeare scholar. The terms (algorithm, human studies research, IRB), let alone the processes themselves, involve a complex set of negotiations for the researcher. It is clear that treating materials on the Internet as digital objects subject to viral movement or texts in their own right is easier than engaging the processes that allow one to interact with the producers, users, and consumers of these materials. After all, we already know how to treat texts ethically. What this essay seeks to convey, however, is that ethical lapses occur even where Shakespeare and other literary scholars do not engage in participatory research. While Internet sources, like "Crank That Shakespeare" and "Hamlet ST.," are clearly works suitable for Shakespeare-based research, they are also dynamic sources that are difficult to separate from their producers and creators precisely because of the interactive medium employed. While Shakespeare scholars may choose not to engage with these producers and creators, such a decision does not nullify the methodological and ethical complexities of researching social media Shakespeare.

APPENDIX I: BORROWERS AND LENDERS GUIDELINES 1. While you do not need legal permission to include citations, URLs, and clips from YouTube Shakespeare examples, we have some common-sense guidelines that we have been following. 2. You have permission to discuss these producers' work. If you can reach them and get permission for linking or, or better, reproducing their work, that would be great. Just collect all the permissions together for us. 3. Consider whether you might ask for permission not simply to link, but for the journal to download and host a copy of the clip. That way we would not be at the mercy of the vagaries of YouTube video lifespans. 4. In any case, 30-second clips are considered fair use. 5. A practical consideration: whether linking or embedding videos, if you include too many, the loading time gets burdensome. So pick and choose which ones you really want. Exemplary screen shots work well also and selecting 30 second bits to focus readers' attention on what you discuss is often helpful. 6. Are any of your authors minors or even just young people? If so, in our own work we are extra careful about these. Unless I have the author's explicit permission, I don't include clips with young people acting (again, unless they are in a sanctioned school production or something like that) or especially include their faces. 7. But we can check all these things on a case-by-case basis. The first task is to figure out a selection of which clips — either full-length, or 30-second snippets you'd want to use — and/or screen shots would be good for your essay. 8. In the end, we'd prefer to have the URLs but not real names, and any clips you reference that are not in the essay proper can be listed separately in the "Online Resources" section of your essay.

APPENDIX II: RECONSIDERING RESEARCH METHODOLOGY IN ONLINE CONTEXTS Human subjects in online contexts complicate deciding what is public and private in social media settings, and prompt questions on how to make sense of the gray areas that fall between those binary lines. While scholars need to check with their home institution, the following questions — although not intended to be comprehensive — may be of value and prompt reflection on process and publication of literary scholars' social media Shakespeare research in ways that reconsider, rather than reinvent, methodologies that implicate the living, versus the textual, human subject. www.borrowers.uga.edu/1755/show 9/13 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 1. Are there human subjects identifiable in the research? 2. To what degree should the human subjects be made identifiable in the research? 3. How will participants become involved in the research project? 4. What formal recruitment procedures, or criteria for inclusion/exclusion are in place for these participants? 5. What is the nature of their participation in the research? (In other words, will their participation involve one-time, short-time, longer- time commitments?) 6. Will the participants collaborate with the researcher or research institution? 7. Do the participants include the researcher's own students or employees? Explain how the possibility of conflict of interest will be minimized. 8. Describe what possible risks to research participants may be entailed in their participation in the study. (These risks may include, but are not limited to, physical stress, threats to their safety, psychological or emotional distress, risk of other repercussions beyond the research context such as loss of employment, licensure, leisure, etc.) 9. Will the research include participants under the age of 18? 10. Will the research include participants who are members of tribal communities in the U.S. or First Nations of Canada? 11. Will the research include participants who are in prison?

NOTES 1. In social science research contexts, these individuals are commonly referred to as human subjects; nevertheless, the term "human subject" is fraught with tension. The Association of Internet Researchers notes in its 2012 Ethical Guidelines that human subject "has long been critiqued for being ill-suited for models of inquiry that follow non-biomedical procedures . . . (I)n internet research, 'human subject' has never been a good fit for describing many internet-based research environments" (Markham and Buchanan 2012). I employ "human subject" in this work to remain consistent with the term used by my home institution's Office of Research Integrity and Assurance. I also use Stephen O'Neill's term "YouTubers" to refer specifically to human subjects located on YouTube. 2. See YouTube's Terms of Service (section 6) for additional information on YouTube's waiver of confidentiality, available at https://www.youtube.com/t/terms (https://www.youtube.com/t/terms). 3. I refer to fair use principles in the United States; these principles vary in different countries. For more information, see http://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/ (http://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/). 4. I have the video channel host's permission to cite "Crank that Shakespeare." Although I know this YouTuber's name, age, and location, and have his permission to use this information in this publication, I have chosen to exclude traceable markers of his identity herein and refer to him as zman. I believe there exists very low risk of future harm to any of the video's participants; nevertheless, I still have reservations about creating a potential identity trail in this work. This decision is not without its own ethical complications: zman is proud of his YouTube work and informs me he was over the age of eighteen when the video was made and uploaded onto YouTube. Am I denying zman explicit recognition for his work? I do not think so. After all, the YouTube title is intact; anyone who views the video will learn both zman's YouTube name and his real identity. I have, as I have stated above, made anonymous the true identifier of the video title and the producer and the actor in "Hamlet ST." 5. Viewed intermittently from 13 November 2008 to 30 September 2013. 6. Uploaded July 2007, viewed intermittently from 13 November 2008 to 30 September 2013. The video title "Hamlet ST." and all names associated with this YouTube posting are fabricated. See Markham 2012 for additional details on fabrication as a theory and methodology. 7. Additional information about "Hamlet ST." was acquired through a secondary YouTube video, in which videographer YZ answers interviewer questions on the production of "Hamlet ST." 8. For additional discussions on YouTube Shakespeares and race, see Thompson 2011. 9. Christy Desmet notes that YouTubers frequently attend closely to details and minutiae of a play. See Desmet 2008, 237. 10. The notion of online "identity tourism" is borrowed from Nakamura 2002. 11. "Crank That Shakespeare" was uploaded onto YouTube on 31 March 2008. The video was uploaded onto BardBox on 7 November 2008. According to Jean Burgess, "the term viral video is used to refer simply to those videos which are viewed by a large number of people, generally as a result of knowledge about the video being spread rapidly through the internet population via word-of-mouth," though I would add that viral videos are also disseminated via broadcast media (2008, 101). 12. See, for instance, Global Shakespeares (http://globalshakespeares.mit.edu/ (http://globalshakespeares.mit.edu/)) and the British Film & TV archive (http://bufvc.ac.uk/shakespeare/ (http://bufvc.ac.uk/shakespeare/)). 13. Shakespeare organizations such as the Royal Shakespeare Company use social media sites like Twitter for their pedagogical initiatives, such as the RSC's work for children that features children, "Stand up for Shakespeare." Nevertheless, as Gitelman notes, for most humanities based scholars "research and publication . . . are so far persistently individual" practices (2010, 31). For examples of RSC practices, see http://www.rsc.org.uk/sufs/ (http://www.rsc.org.uk/sufs/). 14. With regard to YouTuber comments, YouTube's community guidelines state, "We encourage free speech and defend everyone's right to express unpopular points of view. But we don't permit hate speech (speech which attacks or demeans a group based on race or ethnic origin, religion, disability, gender, age, veteran status, and sexual orientation/gender identity)." For more information, see http://www.youtube.com/t/community_guidelines (http://www.youtube.com/t/community_guidelines).

www.borrowers.uga.edu/1755/show 10/13 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 15. In his YouTube video presentations, anthropologist Michael Wesch discusses YouTube, its use, and, as of 2008, discusses YouTuber cultural practices such as trolling and viral dissemination, and offers his empirical observations on YouTube community cultures: see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09gR6VPVrpw (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09gR6VPVrpw) and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPAO-lZ4_hU (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPAO-lZ4_hU). 16. Once again, one example of an exception to this statement are Borrowers and Lenders's recommended guidelines. 17. The term remix in the new millennium refers to larger practices, cultural and technological, that take pre-existing materials and reassemble them to form new cultural artifacts and/or technological products. I use the term remix to designate the combination of various disciplinary research methodologies. See also Lawrence Lessig's theory of remix culture in online environments: http://remix.lessig.org/ (http://remix.lessig.org/). 18. See endnote 15 for link to YouTube's community guidelines. 19. At the time of writing, YouTube is changing its email function. For additional information, see https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/3523594?hl=en (https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/3523594?hl=en). 20. McKernan's curatorship and archiving involves a kind of work — categorizing original videos specifically for the Shakespeare community — for instance, by play — that YouTube itself does not undertake. McKernan discontinued archiving YouTube Shakespeares on Bardbox.wordpress.com in September 2012; however, in March 2016, he reactivated and relaunched the site as Bardbox.net. 21. Viewed intermittently October 2008-March 2014. 22. See Jenkins 2013 for additional discussion of the nature of viral dissemination and participatory culture. 23. Accessed December 2009. 24. The practice of curating and archiving YouTube Shakespeares is not unique to McKernan's In addition, many YouTubers (including me) curate/archive playlists on YouTube; some, like mine, are marked private, while others, like Stephen O'Neill's, are open to viewers. See O'Neill's collection at http://www.youtube.com/user/Shakespeareonutube?feature=mhee (http://www.youtube.com/user/Shakespeareonutube?feature=mhee). 25. While zman, the video's producer, may choose to remove "Crank That Shakespeare" from his YouTube channel, a wide and unknowable number of digital tools and sites, such as MIT's YouTomb project, may have copies of the video. YouTomb, "a research project by MIT Free Culture that tracks videos taken down from YouTube," illustrates how even producer video clips removed by the producer are never fully deleted from the Internet (YouTomb). While YouTomb's specific goal is to track YouTube clips deleted for "alleged copyright violation," countless other websites have the capability to capture and store/transmit myriad web materials that could through the Internet for indefinite lengths of time (YouTomb). 26. By sensitive, I mean racialized, foul, and insulting language. Occasionally participatory comments include incriminating information. 27. See Lovink 2013 for further information on comments as "mass hermeneutics." 28. The 2002 publication accessed intermittently September 2008-March 2013. The 2012 announcement of the updated ethics guideline included the following message: "This 2012 document does not replace the 2002 guidelines, but lives alongside and builds from it. We hope both documents continue to provide a useful resource for researchers, students, academic institutions, and regulatory bodies" (Markham Air-L Digest, v104.10) (http://listserv.aoir.org/pipermail/air-l-aoir.org/2013-March/057447.html). Hence, both editions of AoIR's ethical guidelines, the 2002 edition helmed by Charles Ess and the 2012 update co-led by Annette Markham and Elizabeth Buchanan, are quoted throughout this article. 29. For AoIR's current (2012) full algorithm see the website: http://www.aoir.org/reports/ethics.pdf (http://www.aoir.org/reports/ethics.pdf). 30. YouTube's age requirements are as follows: "You affirm that you are either more than 18 years of age, or an emancipated minor, or possess legal parental or guardian consent, and are fully able and competent to enter into the terms, conditions, obligations, affirmations, representations, and warranties set forth in these Terms of Service, and to abide by and comply with these Terms of Service. In any case, you [must] affirm that you are over the age of 13, as the YouTube Website is not intended for children under 13. If you are under 13 years of age, then please do not use the YouTube Website. There are lots of other great web sites for you. Talk to your parents about what sites are appropriate for you" ("Terms of Service" 2009 and 2013). 31. AoIR defines minors as ranging in age between 12 and 18.

REFERENCES Barnes, Susan B. 2004. "Issues of Attribution and Identification in Online Social Research." In Online Social Research: Methods, Issue, & Ethics. Edited by Mark D. Johns, Shing-Ling Sarina Chen, and G. Job Hall. New York: Peter Lang. 203-22. Black, Rebecca. 2008. Adolescents and Online Fan Fiction. New York: Peter Lang. Burgess, Jean. 2008. "'All Your Chocolate Rain Are Belong to Us?': Viral Video, YouTube, and the Dynamics of Participatory Culture." In Video Vortex Reader: Responses to YouTube. Edited by Geert Lovink and Sabine Niederer. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures. 101- 110. Available online: http://networkcultures.org/videovortex/vv-reader/ (http://networkcultures.org/videovortex/vv-reader/) [accessed March 15 2016]. Denzin, Norman K. 2004. "Prologue: Online Environments and Interpretive Social Research." In Online Social Research: Methods, Issue, & Ethics. Edited by Mark D. Johns, Shing-Ling Sarina Chen, and G. Jon Hall. New York: Peter Lang. Desmet, Christy. 2008. "Paying Attention in Shakespeare Parody: From Tom Stoppard to YouTube." Shakespeare Studies 61: 227-38. www.borrowers.uga.edu/1755/show 11/13 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Ess, Charles. 2002. "Ethical Decision-Making and Internet Research: Recommendation from the AoIR Ethics Working Committee." Association of Internet Researchers. Available online: http://aoir.org/reports/ethics.pdf (http://aoir.org/reports/ethics.pdf) [accessed 10 June 2013]. Ess, Charles. 2010. Digital Media Ethics. Malden: Polity Press. Gitelman, Lisa. 2010. "Welcome to the Bubble Chamber: Online in the Humanities Today." The Communication Review 13: 27-36. Available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10714420903558647#.VBiD7Of855c (http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10714420903558647#.VBiD7Of855c) [accessed 12 September 2013]. Hodgdon, Barbara. 2010. "(You)Tube Travel: The 9:59 to Dover Beach, Stopping at Fair Verona and Elsinore." Shakespeare Bulletin 28:3, 313- 330. James, Carrie, Katie Davis, Andrea Flores, John M. Francis, Lindsay Pettingill, Margaret Rundle, and Howard Gardner. 2008. "Young People, Ethics, and the New Digital Media: A Synthesis from the Good Play Project." GoodWork Project Report Series. Available online: http://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/titles/free_download/ 9780262513630_Young_People_Ethics_and_New_Digital_Media.pdf (http://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/titles/free_download/9780262513630_Young_People_Ethics_and_New_Digital_Media.pdf) [accessed 10 September 2013]. Jenkins, Henry. 2006. Convergence Culture: Where New and Old Media Collide. New York: New York University Press. Jenkins, Henry, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green. 2013. Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture. New York: New York University Press. Kuhn, Virginia. 2008. "Video Interview: Fair Use." Anthrovlog. 13 May. Available online: http://www.youtube.com/watch? v=WRCeNFeU3to (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRCeNFeU3to) [accessed 10 September 2013]. Lange, Patricia. 2008. "(Mis)Conceptions About YouTube." In Video Vortex Reader: Responses to YouTube. Edited by Geert Lovink and Sabine Niederer. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures. 87-99. Available online: http://networkcultures.org/wp- content/uploads/2008/10/vv_reader_small.pdf (http://networkcultures.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/vv_reader_small.pdf) [accessed 15 March 2016]. Lankshear, Colin, and Michele Knobel. 2008. "Introduction: Digital Literacies — Concepts, Policies and Practices." In Digital Literacies: Concepts, Policies, and Practices. Edited by Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel. New York: Peter Lang. 1-16. LeBesco, Kathleen. 2004. "Managing Visibility, Intimacy, and Focus in Online Critical Ethnography." In Online Social Research: Methods, Issue, & Ethics. Edited by Mark D. Johns, Shing-Ling Sarina Chen, and G. Jon Hall. New York: Peter Lang, 63-79. Lovink, Geert. 2013. Networks without a Cause: A Critique of Social Media. Malden: Polity. Markham, Annette. 2012. "Fabrication as Ethical Practice: Qualitative Inquiry in Ambiguous Internet Contexts." Information, Communication, & Society 15:3. Available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369118X.2011.641993#.VBh6K-f855c (http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369118X.2011.641993#.VBh6K-f855c) [accessed 16 September 2014]. Markham, Annette, and Nancy Baym. 2008. Internet Inquiry: Conversations about Method. Los Angeles: Sage. Markham, Annette, and Elizabeth Buchanan. 2012. "Ethical Decision-Making and Internet Research: Recommendations from the AoIR Ethics Working Committee." Volume 2. Available online: http://www.aoir.org/reports/ethics2.pdf (http://www.aoir.org/reports/ethics2.pdf) [accessed 3 June 2014]. McKee, Heidi A. and James E. Porter. 2009. The Ethics of Internet Research: A Rhetorical, Case-Based Process. New York: Peter Lang. McKernan, Luke. 2008a. "About." BardBox. Available online: http://bardbox.wordpress.com/about/ (http://bardbox.wordpress.com/about/) [accessed 10 January 2012]. McKernan, Luke. 2008b. "Intro to 'Crank that Shakespeare'." BardBox. Available online: http://bardbox.wordpress.com/2008/11/07/crank- that-shakespeare/ (http://bardbox.wordpress.com/2008/11/07/crank-that-shakespeare/) [accessed 10 January 2012]. Nakamura, Lisa. 2002. Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet. New York and London: Routledge. Office for Human Research Protections. Decision Charts. 2008-2013. Available online: http://www.hhs.gov/ohrp/policy/checklists/decisioncharts.html (http://www.hhs.gov/ohrp/policy/checklists/decisioncharts.html) [accessed 10 June 2013]. O'Neill, Stephen. 2014. Shakespeare and YouTube: New Media Forms of the Bard. London: Bloomsbury. Strangelove, Michael. 2010. Watching YouTube. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Thompson, Ayanna. 2011. Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America. New York: Oxford University Press. Thompson, Ayanna. 2010. "Unmooring the Moor: Researching and Teaching on YouTube." Shakespeare Quarterly 61.3: 337-54. Zimmer, Michael. 2010. "'But the Data Is Already Public': On the Ethics of Research in Facebook." Ethics, Information, and Technology 12: 313- 25. www.borrowers.uga.edu/1755/show 12/13 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation zman. "Crank That Shakespeare." YouTube [accessed 30 March 2016].

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From Face to Facebook: Levinas's Radical Ethics and "Shakespeare Friends"

(/current) LISA S. STARKS-ESTES, UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH FLORIDA ST. PETERSBURG

ABSTRACT (/archive) In this essay, I employ Emmanuel Levinas's philosophy to examine intersubjectivity in social media and to reflect on the Facebook group "Shakespeare Friends," which I created and administer. Levinas's "face-to-face" theory provides a radical way of thinking about ethics in social media and mediated communication, one that points to their transformative effects while avoiding the now commonplace notions that social media and other computer technologies are either entirely liberating our identities and relationships or completely eroding them. Levinas's theory of communication (the "saying" over the "said") relies on his concept of "substitution" and "proximity" between people, which may be — and has been — applied to analyses of online as well as offline relationships. This theory, I contend, is especially relevant to social media like Facebook, as evidenced in the exchanges on "Shakespeare Friends." I employ Levinas's radical ethics to analyze the group "Shakespeare Friends" as a kind of "walled garden," a community with its own boundaries and dynamics — a "networked public." Levinas's theory seems especially relevant to this group, as many, including Levinas himself, have seen his ethics as deeply implicated in Shakespeare's texts and appropriations of them. Using current social media theory to study the functions and affordances of social media sites in general, Facebook in particular, I focus on "spreadability" and "coaxed affordances," which allow for this active interaction. I observe that "Shakespeare Friends" upsets traditional hierarchies and barriers and crosses geographical boundaries, making it possible for members to exchange ideas with fellow Shakespeare scholars, educators, and practitioners all over the world. In effect, the group is a virtual microcosm of the global nature of contemporary Shakespeare studies, a supportive means of exchange between Shakespearean scholars, educators, or practitioners in theatre or other arts.

Why does the other concern me? What is Hecuba to me? Am I my brother's keeper? These questions have meaning only if one has already supposed that the ego is concerned only with itself, is only a concern for itself. — Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence

I created the Facebook group "Shakespeare Friends" by mistake — a happy mistake, it turns out — but a mistake nevertheless.1 I had just recently joined Facebook, after vehemently opposing all social networks for years, and clicked the "groups" button on the left-hand margin, assuming it would allow me to form a list of my friends who were Shakespearean colleagues. So, I added the names of fellow Shakespeareans into the group and labeled it "Shakespeare Friends." I soon discovered that I had not compiled a list for my own use, but rather had created an online collective, a coming together of people with some shared interests — a networked community. Soon after that moment, I realized what opportunity this fortuitous error had provided me, what kinds of interaction and relationships could be facilitated with this tool.

I had come a long way from my initial resistance to social media. I recall proudly announcing that I was not one of the gullible many who had succumbed to the temptation of the Facebook phenomenon while chatting with two colleagues in the hotel bar at a Shakespeare Association of America meeting that previous year. Both of my companions were in agreement, one of them trumping my rejection of Facebook by declaring that not only did he not participate in social media, but also he did not even own a cell phone, the other confessing to having a Facebook account but adding, in defense, that he never used it and, to date, had acquired only six friends.

So, how did I become a regular Facebook user and group administrator? After ignoring some emails requesting me to join, I saw one from a very kind retired co-worker, with an invitation to join Facebook to see pictures of her grandchildren. At that point, I felt rather foolish and mean-spirited not to accept the request. It occurred to me that, perhaps, having a Facebook account would simply make it easier for me to stay connected to her and others; it would not devour my soul, take over my life, or anything of the sort. Consequently, I joined, and since then, I have found that using social media has radically transformed my sense of community www.borrowers.uga.edu/1802/show 1/13 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation and interpersonal relationships. I have used Facebook to reconnect with family, loved ones, and friendly acquaintances whom I had not seen or even contacted for decades. I even recently located and reestablished a relationship with my best friend from high school, whom I had not seen in thirty years. Moreover, I have established new relationships and strengthened bonds with people in my field and with others, some who live near my home, others at long distances, located all over the world. To avoid sounding like an advertisement for Facebook, however, I will note that not all my experiences on it have been positive; there have been a few contentious encounters and uncomfortable moments, as well as a couple of issues concerning boundaries and focus that have arisen in the "Shakespeare Friends" group. Nevertheless, my experience with social media has enriched, rather than destroyed, my relationships. Along the way, I have found administering the "Shakespeare Friends" group to be a positive undertaking overall; It has been greatly rewarding to watch the community grow and to witness members forge supportive links amongst themselves.

RADICAL ETHICS AND DIGITAL MEDIA My involvement with social media has also opened me up to new views about technology, communication, and relationships. Since I opened my Facebook account, I have had time to reflect seriously on social media, their effects, and their potential for enabling and fostering interpersonal interactions that are both meaningful and enriching. Interestingly, I have found that the theory of Emmanuel Levinas provides valuable insights into the examination of intersubjective relations, on Facebook specifically and with communication technology more generally. Although Levinas does not speak directly to matters of social media, as his work predates the internet, his philosophy itself implies this kind of connection. As Amit Pinchevski has argued, because Levinas reflects on the role of mediation in the communication of his own ideas, which center on the links between subjectivity, social justice, and communication, Levinas's theory "may thus lead toward a radical ethics of media — radical in the sense that it posits the act of mediation itself as the root of such ethics" (Pinchevski 2014, 48). After reflecting on this point, I believe that Levinas's theory provides a way into thinking about ethics in social media and mediated communication in terms that point to their transformative effects while avoiding the now commonplace notions that social media and other computer technologies are either entirely liberating our identities and relationships or completely eroding them.

Much popular, as well as some academic discourse, presents technology as an anthropomorphized entity that has the potential either to save or destroy us, with the internet and social media depicted as redemptive or destructive agents that promise joy or threaten doom to humanity. Writers such as Richard A. Cohen, Nancy K. Baym, Bernard Stiegler, and Mark B. N. Hansen have analyzed these rhetorical positions, pointing out that this dualistic view of technology as either utopian or dystopian is nothing new. Changes in communication technology — from the invention of the alphabet and writing to the printing press, to modern inventions of the telegraph and telephone, to computer technology — have all inspired exalted hopes as well as deep distrust, distress, and panic. Critics positing deterministic views of computer technology — whether they see it as a liberating force that creates a utopian vision by opening up multiple possibilities in a virtual reality, like Sherry Turkle, or condemn it as a destructive Big Brother that produces a dystopian world by eroding the social fabric and separating people from each other, like Lucas Introna (Turkle 1995; Introna 2002)2 — grant technology a human-like agency beyond its own ontological status,3 as "if it were an evil genius allied against us," as Cohen describes it (Cohen 2000, 32).

In his work on Levinas and computer technology (which he terms "cybernetics"), Cohen dismantles these arguments, revealing a much less glorious or horrific conception of the computer age. Employing Levinas's theory (explained more fully below), Cohen describes communication technologies as tools that enable humans to interact. He claims that the primary issue is "whether computer technology produces a radical transformation of humanity," in the sense of its full liberation or entire destruction; "or whether, in contrast, it is simply a very advanced instrument, a tool or means of communication that is in itself morally neutral" (Cohen 2000, 28). I agree with Cohen that, from Levinas's perspective, technology itself is morally neutral — that is, it does not make ethical choices and therefore cannot act upon human beings benevolently or malevolently. "The computers themselves," Cohen notes, "like alphabet letters and telephone, like pencils and books . . . are neither good nor evil" (34). Analyzing the ontology of digital technology — or Web 2.0, as it is called — from a perspective that does not draw from Levinas or deal with ethical implications of technology, Aden Evens describes this neutrality of the digital as "an indifference with regard to particularities of choice. By refusing to favor one choice over another the digital presents itself as an unusually neutral and free surface of inscription" (Evens 2012, par. 24). Importantly, for this aspect of digital media — its reliance on the abstraction of a binary code that does not itself choose — "there is no choice but choice" (Evens 2012, par. 24).

Although digital media are in themselves morally neutral — incapable of ethical choice and human agency — the use of them does, most definitely, deeply influence and shape human moral choices and actions. Moreover, Web 2.0 is extremely complex in ways that extend beyond previous technologies, challenging us to examine them, and their effects on us, carefully and critically. Indeed, Web 2.0 has ushered in a new role for media themselves: to disguise or render invisible their associations with the technology that supports them. In other words, the interface of digital media appears to users as disconnected from its technological infrastructure, offering a view that conceals its own technological workings (see Hansen 2010b, 172, 178-84).

As this new kind of technology, Web 2.0 has become so integral to contemporary life that its use has greatly altered the way we think and communicate with others, as addressed fully below, on a one-to-one and one-to-immense audience. Indeed, as Hansen has stressed, it is more the "sheer connectivity, the simple capacity to connect on a massive, one-to-many scale" than the actual www.borrowers.uga.edu/1802/show 2/13 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation content that is "mediated by Web 2.0" (Hansen 2010b, 180). With this ability to connect with countless people world-wide in this age of Web 2.0 come new ethical issues, as digital media now offer us the "daunting obligations and responsibilities of a global humanity," the results of which rest with its users, not with technology itself. How we employ it, how "we wish to use and steer the awesome power of contemporary information technology," in Cohen's words, will determine its moral outcomes (Cohen 2000, 35, emphasis in original).

TECHNOLOGY, MEDIATED COMMUNICATION, AND RELATIONSHIPS Although they have not employed Levinas in their analyses, other media critics and theorists have also examined technology and its complex relationship to the human subject and culture. In analyzing her data on relationships and digital media, Nancy Baym echoes Cohen's claims above, arguing that "mediated communication is not a space"; instead, she asserts, "it is an additional tool people use to connect, one which can only be understood as deeply embedded in and influenced by the daily realities of embodied life" (Baym 2010, 152). As an instrument that we use in everyday interactions, mediated technology greatly shapes how we communicate, how we connect with each other; but in itself, it does not entirely create us or mold our subjectivity, as deterministic perspectives of the computer age would have us believe. Even seemingly artificial identities fabricated online are, in complex ways, related to the self who designs them; they are neither completely distinct, nor virtual realities absolutely divorced from the so-called real world, as Baym's research has shown (Baym 2010, 152-54). Rather, these digital identities and realities are intricately connected, inextricably linked to human beings and their lives in various ways. Digital media affect us on multiple levels for, as Hansen explains, these new media, "by changing the conditions for the production of experience . . . destabilize existing patterns of biological, psychical, and collective life even as they furnish new faculties" (Hansen 2010b, 173). In different terms, Evens points out that Web 2.0 has a profound effect on our lives, in that "[n]ot only our artifacts but our bodies, our schedules, our habits of cognition, our ways of being by ourselves and with others are now thoroughly informed by the digital" (Evens 2012, par. 1). Although Web 2.0 offers new and different challenges from previous media, it is important to keep in mind that technology is, and always has been, intrinsic to and inseparable from human subjectivity and relationships in day-to-day life. Understanding the history of technology and humanity can enable us to grapple with the challenges of life with new media in more informed ways.

Historically, each advent of novel technological advances has ushered in a new wave of panic and distrust, raising issues not only about technology but also about humanity itself, what it means to be "real" or genuine, to connect fully with others. As Baym puts it, in our present "digital age, just as at the dawn of writing, media evoke questions about what it means to be authentically human" (Baym 2010, 154). In his introduction to Stiegler's view of memory and mediated communication, Hansen traces this history, pointing out that a conception of technological memory as deceptive imitation, which dates back to Plato (in his Phaedrus), has informed Western civilization's ambivalent responses to it ever since, as Jacques Derrida has demonstrated in his deconstruction of Western metaphysics of presence in his theories of grammatology, the trace, and différance. Plato's notion of the pharmakon (both a danger and its cure), which structured early notions of writing and memory, continues to underlie views of new media (Hansen 2010a, 66). Nevertheless, as Hansen illustrates through the myths of Prometheus and Epimetheus, which he interprets as exemplifying the "originary technicity of the human," technology is integral to human life (Hansen 2010b, 177). Hansen adds that, for Stiegler, "human beings, from the very origin of the species, have always been mediated" (Hansen 2010b, 176). Hansen describes technology as fundamental to human existence — not peripheral, adjunct, or supplemental, but rather "essential — the essential — dimension of the human" (Hansen 2010b, 64; emphasis in original). For Stiegler, technology has evolved alongside humanity, for "human beings, in their developmental and genetic evolution, are 'essentially' correlated with technical media." In this light, Hansen continues, "mediation forms the very basis of human existence" (Hansen 2010b, 177). I agree with the crucial, vital role that technical media have played and continue to play in human development and subjectivity; however, I do not see it as fully overtaking or displacing the subject. Instead, I would argue that mediation works in and through human beings in their connections to others, in the intersubjective relations that constitute humanity as expounded in Levinas's theory, which I address more fully below.

Focusing specifically on relationships and communication technology, Baym traces the same trajectory of technological advances in human history discussed above, noting how each innovation that has attempted to bridge geographical (and, in some cases, temporal) distance by allowing humans to communicate when not physically present — such as the inventions of writing, the telephone, email — has caused apprehension and distress along with euphoric excitement. New media, she argues, produce tremendous anxiety by exacerbating the fear that the mediation of these technologies makes interpersonal communication "increasingly shallow," thereby "threaten[ing] [the] sanctity of our personal relationships"; at the same time, new media create great promise by offering the possibility for more people to interact, paving the way toward "new opportunities and to stronger relationships and more diverse connections" (Baym 2010, 1). Baym's research counters the former perspective, as she notes that in any instance of mediated communication wherein one has "limited cues" (depending on the type of technology, there may be a lack of cues such as body language, tone of voice, or other contexts), users have a "communication imperative" that motivates them to use whatever cues are available in imaginative ways to overcome the limitations of that media to connect with one another in meaningful and creative ways (Baym 2010, 70).

Although most of the relationships established and maintained online fall into the category that Baym terms "weak" rather than "strong ties," it does not follow that the internet has deteriorated bonds between people, as commentators such as Introna, cited www.borrowers.uga.edu/1802/show 3/13 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation above, or William Deresiewicz have claimed. Deresiewicz insists that online relationships, particularly those on social media websites like Facebook, have ushered in "faux friendships" in contemporary culture, wherein flesh-and-blood people are reduced to a "simulacra of . . . friends, little dehydrated packets of images and information, no more my friends than a set of baseball cards is the New York Mets" (Deresiewicz 2009).4 Conversely, Baym demonstrates that the majority of human relationships, in "real life" as well as online, could be described as "weak ties"; that is, they are "limited in [the] range, thoughts, and feelings . . . exchanged." These relationships, she points out, are not inherently bad but, rather, extremely necessary, for they provide people with invaluable resources that help them learn about themselves, garner help when needed, gather and exchange knowledge, and so on (Baym 2010, 125).

Moreover, as her research and numerous personal experiences of users have shown, mediated communication has — and will continue, I would argue, in whatever format it takes — to provide people with instruments to help them forge "strong ties" as well — substantial, significant relationships with one another. Baym herself provides some examples, as can I, for I met my husband of eight years online, which is not at all unusual today. As Baym puts it, in the "millennia after the inventions of the first communication technologies, we remain oriented towards preserving the authenticity of human connection and ourselves. We develop and appropriate technologies as means of fostering meaningful personal connections" (Baym 2010, 155). I see the conclusions of Baym's research as supporting a point of view that is very much in line with Levinas's face-to-face theory, the challenges it poses to traditional notions of selfhood and technology, and the insights it provides into issues of mediated communication.

LEVINAS'S RADICAL ETHICS AND SHAKESPEARE Levinas's philosophy revolves around the ethics of interpersonal connections, wherein the relationship of the "I" to the other forms the basis of life. Levinas challenges traditional western philosophies, in that he posits that relations with the other pre-exist any kind of being. Rather than assuming that the "I" or ego exists via its own consciousness and then attempts to interact with others, Levinas argues that it is only through the other that the "I" emerges at all; this interaction occurs pre-consciousness, pre-ego formation, pre- or "other than" being. Put simply, we "feel" others before we "know" them. For Levinas, therefore, the human being is not an isolated, contained entity, a subject that has freedom to act except when inhibited by external others who threaten to assault or compromise it, as it is in liberal humanist frameworks of subjectivity inherited from Descartes. Instead, in Levinas's theory, the human being is constituted in, through, by, and for the other — in the face of the other — first and foremost. Being-for- the-other, substituting oneself for the other, being charged with the moral responsibility for the other in an uneven relationship (as one cannot assume that the other is constructed through the self as well) — in other words, putting oneself in the place of the other — is what makes one human to begin with. Marc Santos, who also uses Levinas's theory to examine relationships on Facebook, describes it this way: Levinas's ethics stress our debt to alterity for the very formation of our existence; this debt charges us with an infinite responsibility for others. These intersubjective ethics are asymmetrical because I cannot assume that I construct the other as she constructs me. I always owe more than I have to give. The other changes me before a (conscious, thinking, responsive) "I" ever emerges on the scene to make any kind of "sense." (Santos 2011, 10) For Levinas, then, ethics or moral behavior is not a supplement or an add-on to an already fully-formed subject; conversely, it is the basis upon which the subject is formed, the primary philosophy itself, the foundation of all.

Interestingly, Levinas's ethical philosophy, built on the ideas of the "face-to-face" relationship of the self to the other and of "substitution," or putting oneself in the other's shoes, is the very characteristic that many, including Levinas himself, see as quintessentially Shakespearean. In a radio interview from 1981, Levinas stated that Shakespeare was a major influence on him when he was growing up (Levinas, 1985, 22); and even though Levinas does not discuss Shakespeare at length, he does refer to him at numerous stages of his work, mostly in his writings before World War II. He does not cite Shakespeare as an authority; rather, he employs the plays primarily as illustrative examples of various points.5 Mainly, Levinas argues that Shakespeare's drama, as well as other great literature, depicts this inextricable link between humanity and ethics: not by aping or tendentiously transmitting philosophical concepts, but by depicting this idea of being-for-the-other. In his early Time and the Other (originally published in 1947, Levinas 1987), Levinas states that "it sometimes seems to me that the whole of philosophy is but a meditation of Shakespeare" (Levinas 1987, 72). According to Cohen, this statement means not that the entire history of philosophy deals with Shakespeare but instead, that "the whole of philosophy is a meditation by Shakespeare, Shakespeare's meditation" (Cohen 2010, 151; emphasis in original). In this light, Shakespeare's plays can be said to incorporate philosophical concepts, rendering them into a more tangible register. As Cohen puts it, in Levinas's view, "Philosophy lives in thought, in concepts, in knowledge . . . while Shakespeare presents a world, an artistic rendition of the life-world in its unfinished, temporal, and dialogical character" (Cohen 2010, 151). Cohen explains that, for Levinas, Shakespeare's plays and great literature in general come nearer to the "humanity of the human, to the transcendence"6 constitutive of the ethical category of the human, than are the abstract reflections of philosophy" (Cohen 2010, 155).

Levinas sees Shakespeare and other writers such as Dostoyevsky not as conventional moralists who advocate poetic justice and the decorous depiction of characters but, more accurately, as writers concerned with ethical imperatives and questions of social justice. www.borrowers.uga.edu/1802/show 4/13 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation In his Existence and Existents, Levinas devotes two pages to a discussion of Shakespeare (Levinas 1978, 61-62), in which he comes to the conclusion that, as Cohen puts it, "Shakespeare has already grasped and presented in his own way what Levinas grasps and presents philosophically as the foundation — or the nonfoundation — of signification" (Cohen 2010, 165). In other words, Levinas sees Shakespeare as dramatizing the intrasubjective ethics, the theory of one's moral obligation to the other, before he himself conceptualized it in philosophical terms centuries later. In another example from his Humanism of the Other, Levinas points to Shakespeare's King Lear to illustrate this main idea of his ethics, "substitution" (Levinas 2003, 3; see Cohen 2010, 166). In his work overall, Levinas indicates a tremendous, deeply rooted respect and admiration for what he sees as the wisdom and the commitment to his notion of ethics — the "face-to-face" and "substitution" in interpersonal communication — in Shakespeare's dramatic universe.7 Interestingly, Levinas's views on Shakespeare may be linked to applications of his thought in analyses of relationships and digital media.

Beyond the application of these ideas in textual interpretation and exegesis, Levinas's philosophy holds major implications for theories of mediated communication, as it forces one to rethink what it means to communicate or relate to another. Traditional philosophy, working from the model of selfhood noted above, sees the act of communication as thwarted with difficulty, if not complete impossibility. As an insulated "I" or ego, the self may attempt to extend beyond the gulf of its sequestered realm to speak to another, but to no avail, as it instead encounters only a void. If it does connect to another outside itself, the communication is partial, contaminated, false — in Prufrock's words, "That is not what I meant at all; / That is not it, at all" (T. S. Eliot, 1920, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," lines 97-98 [Eliot 1970]). In this framework, because the "truth" cannot be transmitted completely accurately and purely intact from one ego to another, because the self cannot ever truly break out of its isolated orb, the subject is ultimately locked in its own world — alienated and forever distanced from the other, even in the closest or most intimate relationships.

Levinas's radical refiguring of subjectivity, however, dramatically changes this dynamic. As the self exists in and through the other, it is not sealed in a contained ego, but on the contrary, is open to transcend and embrace the other. Life is about reaching out, feeling, sensing — not wholly comprehending — the other. Indeed, human beings are composed of these interactions with others. For Levinas, the importance in communication lies not in the transmission of absolute truth, the correlation between the signifier and the signified; nor is it to be found in the production of complete knowledge. Communication necessarily entails uncertainty. As Levinas explains, "Communication is an adventure of a subjectivity, different from that which is dominated by the concern to recover itself, different from that of coinciding in consciousness; it will involve uncertainty" (Levinas 1974, 120).

For Levinas, the importance in communication exists in the "saying," or the signifying itself, one's reaching out to the other. It is the communicating itself — not the contents of what is communicated — that matters. As Levinas puts it, "The one-for-the-other is the very signifyingness of signification!" (Levinas 1974, 100). In his commentary on Levinas, Cohen sums it up this way: "The source of all signification lies not in signs relating to signs, in the said, but more deeply, more seriously, more painfully, in the moral significance of the face that obligates" (Cohen 2000, 32). Levinas's theory of communication — the "saying" over the "said" — is grounded in his concept of "substitution" — substituting oneself for the other or putting oneself in the other's shoes — which relies on his notion of subjectivity that is based on his theory of the self's one-sided obligation to the other, the concept of "proximity" between people, the "face-to-face" interpersonal connection between them. For Levinas, In starting with sensibility interpreted not as a knowing but as proximity, in seeking in language contact and sensibility, behind the circulation of information it becomes, we have endeavored to describe subjectivity as irreducible to consciousness and thematization. Proximity appears as the relationship with the other, who cannot be resolved into "images" or be exposed in a theme. (Levinas 1974, 100) "Proximity" rather than "knowing" allows for "language contact and sensibility" ("saying") — the reaching out to another without attempting to reduce the other into thingness, an objectified "image" or reductive "theme" (the "said"). This connection happens prior to any kind of consciousness; it forms the basis upon which subjectivity is constituted.

FACE-TO-FACE AND FACEBOOK In applying Levinas's concepts to mediated communication, it is crucial to understand his definition of this term "proximity." Although in general usage the word denotes physical closeness or lack of geographical distance, in Levinas's theory it means something quite different — a figurative rather than literal sense of "closeness," with a moral imperative. Importantly, as Levinas explains, "the relationship of proximity cannot be reduced to any modality of distance or geometrical contiguity, nor to the simple 'representation' of a neighbor; it is already an assignation, an extremely urgent assignation — an obligation, anachronously prior to any commitment" (Levinas 1974, 100-101).

Consequently, Levinas's notion of proximity may be, and has been, applied to analyses of mediated communication, his "face-to- face" theory employed to examine online as well as offline relationships. In countering Introna's use of Levinas to posit a view of communication technology as a force that corrodes interpersonal relationships,8 Cohen stresses that Levinas employs the term "proximity" to mean a kind of communicating and a kind of relationship, not a need to be physically present. Cohen rightly points out that the "said" may occur in actual face to face meetings as well, for "[o]ne can lose sight of the ethical face in the very flesh and www.borrowers.uga.edu/1802/show 5/13 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation blood face that faces"; in fact, "one can objectify" or "'interpret' the other's face, 'reading' from it symptoms, ideologies," for "[t]he face can always become a mask" (Cohen 2000, 31-32). Objectification and reduction of the other most certainly can and does occur in online relationships, as the internet to a large extent is the circulation of images and "info bites." But importantly, the opposite may happen, too. Levinas's face-to-face encounter is possible through mediated communication — be it via a letter sent by snail- mail, an email message, or a Facebook comment — just as it is in "physical" face to face situations for, as Cohen writes, "the 'face' ruptures them, pierces them with the alterity of the other" (Cohen 2000, 34). As Cohen stresses, "The ethical dimension of human proximity transpires across communications made possible by computers, just as human proximity takes place across phone calls, letters, artifacts" (Cohen 2000, 34).

I would argue that Levinas's distinction between "saying" and "said" speaks to crucial issues of ethics and communication related to technology in general and to social media like Facebook in particular, as evidenced in the exchanges on "Shakespeare Friends." Most posts on the group page do fit into the category of the "said" — typically, news items or crowd-sourcing; at other times, however, they gesture beyond the "said" to the "saying," to offer personal support or to connect in some way with the emotional well-being of fellow members. Sometimes, even these info-related posts become meaningful gestures that are closer to "saying"; at other times, they lead to contact beyond the group page to personal messages and the establishment of deeper connections. I have witnessed these kinds of interactions on the group page, and I have also learned about them from member feedback. After posting a request for comments on the group via Facebook messages, I received six substantial responses from users over a wide range, from Ph.D. students to junior and senior faculty members. Besides posts about the group as a resource and way to connect with colleagues on a professional level, a couple of responses indicated that exchanges with group members affected them in more personal or emotional ways. One member commented on recent announcements concerning the deaths of colleagues that had been posted on the group page, noting that although they were "sad," they served to "help foster a sense of community: this is a group I belong to, even if only on the edges at times." In another very touching message, one member expressed how the group not only enabled her to make connections with colleagues, but also provided a way for her to feel as if she were back in her professional community after being physically away from it for an extended time due to a serious accident. She writes that during her long recovery, "I felt so utterly removed from my professional career, that reading posts here somehow made it seem easier to ease back in." She adds that it was "probably the friendliness of all and the genuine interest in our field" that made her feel this way. These accounts, as well as my own experiences, have convinced me that Levinas's face-to-face connection does occur within networked publics, as well as in other modes of communication.

Moreover, the face-to-face interaction is facilitated by a key feature of Facebook and other social media sites — the user's ability to "answer back," to comment on the thoughts of others — which transforms the internet from a machine of the "said," the circulation of info and images, to an apparatus that allows for the "saying," allowing people to relate to each other in a variety of ways. It enables people to connect, support, and validate the feelings and needs of others, just through the effort of "saying" or reaching out itself. Even if "strong ties" do not develop from these gestures, the gestures themselves are meaningful, for "[s]haring the ephemeral — our edges — is what helps define us to each other and, more importantly, to ourselves" (Santos 2011).

Critics of social media, such as Deresiewicz or Jean M. Twenge and W. Keith Campbell, argue that Facebook and other computer technologies promote a narcissism that is based on its users' infantile need for self-validation. From this perspective, one's postings on Facebook constitute a childish need to be recognized, to have our egos stroked, to cry out, "Look at me!!!" Like Santos, I strongly disagree with this now commonplace point of view and argue that what these critics interpret to be "narcissism" is something quite different, even in the most apparently self-involved statuses on Facebook or tweets on Twitter. These posts come from a need to share the self in order to transcend it, to "touch" another out there in hopes of a connection. And, yes, this effort does come from a desire for validation or affirmation, as that desire is bound up with the intrinsic need to communicate with the other. As Santos explains, it is only through traditional frameworks of subjectivity that this need for validation or confirmation is considered to be a "weakness." In light of Levinas's radical rethinking of subjectivity and alterity, not only is this need not a failing, but also it is intrinsic to all human beings. In responding to these charges of narcissism on social network sites, especially Facebook, Santos counters with an argument that "digital technologies might awaken desire for something missing from atomistic modern life; they rekindle a desire for others. What might appear as narcissism could be attending to the abyss, and a new, distributed form of loquacious huddling" (Santos 2011). Facebook, and in particular Facebook groups, provide the tools for users to build online communities that foster this "huddling" in more focused, circumscribed contexts.

In order to examine the possibility of the "face-to-face" on social media sites such as Facebook and groups like "Shakespeare Friends," it is important first to look closely at what constitutes a networked public and how it relates to other notions of "community." danah boyd has defined the term "networked publics" as groups that are "restructured by networked technologies," both in terms of "space" and the "imagined collective that emerges as a result of the intersection of people, technology, and practice" (boyd 2011, 39). In her analysis of networked publics, boyd points out that they share several identical features in common with other kinds of publics: they permit users to come together for "social, cultural, and civic purposes," and importantly, "they help people connect with a world beyond their close friends and family" (boyd 2011, 39). Nonetheless, they do have some unique qualities that one must address in order to examine them closely, for the "architecture" of these networked publics, their "properties,

www.borrowers.uga.edu/1802/show 6/13 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation affordances, and dynamics," set them apart from other kinds of "publics," as the way people work with the properties and affordances of a networked public determines its dynamics (boyd 2011, 40-41).

Crucially, networked publics differ from other kinds of publics in their "underlying structure," for "[n]etworked technologies reorganize how information flows and how people interact with information and each other" (boyd 2011, 41). Social media sites like Facebook, as well as other networked publics, share four common attributes: 1) they permit users to create a "profile"; 2) they allow for users to compile a list of other users with whom they communicate; 3) they enable users to see and cross over others in their own list and in the larger website; and 4) they include "stream-based updates" (boyd 2011, 43). Moreover, boyd continues, there are three "dynamics" that figure in the constitution of networked publics: 1) "invisible audiences" (users cannot always see who is viewing their posts or profile); 2) "collapsed contexts" (no clear indicators of "spatial, social, or temporal boundaries"; and 3) "blurring of public and private" (no clear distinction between the two). Although not all of the dynamics that boyd lists above are relevant to Facebook — for instance the social media network does provide temporal markers and permit one to designate geographical location — some of the features she notes do end up shaping how and in what ways people engage with each other on the network to form communities.

Importantly, despite the limited cues or contexts, online communities still exhibit the five qualities that, according to Baym, are generally considered to be necessary in order for a group of individuals to be considered a "community": they include people who share the same "sense of space," "practices," "resources and support," "identities," and the possibility for "interpersonal relationships" (Baym 2010, 75-89). Of course, not all communities are "positive," as some shared interests of members may include hatred of others, as in online white supremacist groups. It is important to note, however, that these kinds of communities exist offline as well as online; they are not created by or even supposed to be tolerated on Social Media sites like Facebook. Nevertheless, Baym has found through her research that many online communities provide "positive effects of social support," including "emotional,""esteem," and "informational support" (Baym 2010, 83-84). In his personal account, Santos describes the incredible, life-saving support that he and his wife found on Facebook when grappling with their infant daughter's struggle with cancer, support that has helped many others as well.

Moreover, Facebook enables a user like myself to construct a smaller online community from within this larger networked public — a kind of "walled garden," a group with its own boundaries and dynamics. The most challenging and, at times, rather tough part of my role as administrator of this walled garden has been determining where to set its boundaries. Once the group was set up, I had to fine-tune its description and determine who should or should not be admitted as members. Currently, the group has 675 members and is designed for Shakespearean academics (at all stages of their careers), students (mostly graduate level, although there are a couple of advanced undergraduates who are already active in the field, presenting papers at conferences or working with professional theaters), educators (all levels), and professional theater practitioners/performers (of various types). I decided that I wanted the group to bring together scholars, teachers, and other practitioners who work with Shakespeare in other arts and disciplines. I considered making it an open group, but then I realized that, although in principle I liked the idea of a more democratic policy, in practice it would undermine my goal of fostering a community of people with shared, or at least overlapping, interests and backgrounds with Shakespeare. As open forums and other fan groups devoted to Shakespeare already existed on Facebook, I did not see the need to create another one. Instead, I wanted a different kind of group, one that would extend individual horizons without causing members to feel as if they were teachers having to "explain" Shakespeare to the group. Conversely, I wanted members to see themselves as colleagues sharing, interacting, and connecting with each other. I was uncomfortable being the "gatekeeper," but I realized that it was necessary for me to become one to establish and maintain the group dynamic I sought.

This role is not always easy. Difficulties have arisen when I have received requests from people whose backgrounds do not clearly mesh with the description above. In these cases, I have responded with a Facebook message, asking those who have asked to join how they connect with Shakespeare, as per the group's description on Facebook. Usually, this method works fine. However, there have been a couple of instances when members joined who ended up not being a good fit with the group. One, I think, has worked out, but another posed so many problems that members of the group contacted me to express their concerns. I addressed the issue with this member, who then ended up moving on to a different group that better suited his interests. This instance was unpleasant, but it was also an anomaly. Usually, people are up front with me when requesting to join, and I am more than happy to add them. If this group does not seem right for them, I kindly let them know and send them suggestions for other groups that I think would be a better fit for them, for which they seem genuinely thankful. Besides minor issues, I think that the "Shakespeare Friends" group has become the kind of engaged, supportive community that I envisioned.

FACEBOOK AND "COAXED AFFORDANCES" The dynamics of this community, of course, are structured by the specific medium of Facebook, in particular that of the Facebook Group. Before focusing on specific features of the group, it is important to examine the characteristics of Facebook itself. Facebook is, according to Aimeé Morrison, "an advertising medium, a public square, a place to play games, a place to nurture and maintain friendships, a digital photo album, a broadcast medium, and a place to document your daily doings" (Morrison 2014, 114). Describing Facebook as a primarily commercial platform, Morrison designates Facebook users as its "product[s]" as opposed to its www.borrowers.uga.edu/1802/show 7/13 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation "customers" (Morrison 2014, 115). In effect, Facebook not only gathers information from its users in order to try and sell them products, but also it partly generates their narratives as "products." Importantly, despite Facebook's pervasive advertising and never- ending privacy issues, many of us, even those who are keenly aware that Facebook is a commercial enterprise, "gleefully database ourselves" (Morrison 2014, 116). Perhaps it is because the positive aspects of Facebook — its effortless functionality and attractiveness of features that enable us to communicate across geographical lines, to share with and to respond to the lives of others — far outweigh the negative. Moreover, most of us have learned to navigate the interface, to work around advertisements, and to deal with the constant changes made to the platform, including those pertaining to privacy controls. To be informed users of Facebook, we must look closely at how its platform affects us and our interpersonal communication.

Although social media networks like Facebook are relatively new, Morrison and others have begun to analyze their functions, emphasizing how their platforms influence the way users construct their own narratives and respond to those of others. In her research, Morrison has combined the notion of "coaxing" (the pressures and conventions from the medium, genre, and social practices that shape narratives) from autobiography studies with the terms "affordances" (the features of an object that direct and configure the way we use it) and "constraints" (the aspects of an object that curtail or restrain the way we use it) from media studies to develop the concept of "coaxed affordances," which she employs in her investigation of how users compose life stories on Facebook. Morrison points out that the affordances and constraints of Facebook — the written and/or visual prompts within the status and comment boxes themselves, along with other users' practices and generic expectations that have emerged over time — guide or "coax" users' responses, greatly influencing and structuring what they post on Facebook. Morrison notes that "we are guided not only by the often implicit discursive precedent of the genre, but also by the material affordances and constraints of the objects through which we structure these stories ourselves" (Morrison 2014, 117).

Nevertheless, it is important to keep in mind that just because users' comments are coaxed does not necessarily mean that they are somehow false or lack genuineness, or that they are only products molded from the structure of Facebook's interface. Morrison points out that users' narratives are not "coerced with such force or duplicity as to deny their ostensible authoring subjects of agency in their composition" (Morrison 2014, 116). As Morrison puts it, "Digital life writing in the status update feature is coaxed, but it is not determined, even as users do not assert unmitigated free will in their authorship" (Morrison 2014, 125). In examining the coaxing affordances of Facebook, especially its status update feature, one must keep in mind that users often resist or write against the grain of the way they are prompted. For instance, the prompt of the status box itself has changed over time,9 as Morrison points out, but I would add that even when it coaxed a reply — as it did early on in Facebook history when the box prompted a comment that would begin with the user's name, as in "Lisa Starks Estes . . . is happy to announce," or later on when it suggested a more open response with the question, "What's on your mind?" — many users either mocked, ignored, or used the prompt as a springboard. Users often constructed narratives that clearly exceeded or resisted the initial commercial purpose of the feature itself: to provide information for advertisers. Moreover, one point Morrison does not raise is the interesting addition of the automatic comment response box that now appears at the end of a thread of comments following each status update on Facebook and the reply option nested underneath individual comments. I would argue that these features coax us to reply, to answer back, to join in the conversation.

In my group "Shakespeare Friends," I consciously attempt to focus members' posts not only through the group description, but also in my welcome message for newcomers, thereby adding another layer of coaxing, if you will, within the larger context of Facebook. When someone joins the group, I introduce them to the group and add a comment that typically reads, "Welcome to the group, ____! Feel free to post about your work with Shakespeare"; or, "Welcome to the group, ____! Looking forward to hearing about your work with Shakespeare." I started using these prompts after the group had already been active for quite some time, when I noticed that Facebook had added an easy mechanism for posting the introductions on the group page. I thought that these prompts would help new members by reinforcing what they would glean from observing the posts from others in the group: that the conversation of the group revolves around the shared interest of Shakespeare and related areas, which makes it distinct from what might appear on one's regular Facebook timeline. I was a little worried at first that using this prompt might intimidate new members, but I have found the opposite seems to be the case; in fact, I have noticed more postings by newcomers as well as experienced members since I started the welcome posts and prompts. Perhaps the boundaries indicated by this prompt give users the go-ahead to post about their own experiences, work, and achievements within the subject area of the group, as I had hoped, rather than restricting or censoring their responses.

"SHAKESPEARE FRIENDS" AND SPREADABLE MEDIA Even though most of the posts circulated on "Shakespeare Friends" consist of information and images, which would be considered as examples of the "said" in Levinas's theory, they are nevertheless useful to members in significant ways, exemplifying what Henry Jenkins, Joshua Green, and Sam Ford have described as the "spreadability" of social media platforms. They employ this term to describe the "potential, both technical and cultural, for audiences to share content for their own purposes," and the technical resources that make it easier to circulate some kinds of content than others, the economic structures that support or restrict circulation, the attributes of a media text that might appeal to a community's motivation for sharing material, and the social networks that link people through the exchange of meaningful bytes. (Jenkins, Green, and Ford 2013, 3) www.borrowers.uga.edu/1802/show 8/13 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation For Jenkins et al., this concept of "spreadability" opposes the notion of "stickiness," a term used in marketing discourses to refer to the need to create advertising that captures the audience's interest and keeps its attention as long as possible. "Stickiness" is derived from the distribution model that has always been used in advertising on television and other broadcast media, in which advertisers seek to transmit commercial messages to audiences. "Spreadability," on the other hand, has emerged from a more recent model of circulation and participatory culture, which acknowledges that content users share on the internet moves in multiple directions in a dynamic way, not top down from marketers to passive consumers.

The work of Jenkins, et al. is especially helpful in understanding the active role that Facebook users play in the circulation of information, personal narratives, photos, and so on. Employing the platform's affordances, particularly the ease of using hyperlinks to share various kinds of multimedia content, Facebook users may reshape, mix, and reframe material, fashioning their own content from within the larger platform of Facebook. This kind of participation is exemplified in "Shakespeare Friends." In the group's description, I urge members to "post events, news, information related to Shakespeare studies, Shakespeare in performance, and related fields," encouraging or coaching them to participate in the creation of our group's newsfeed and to actively engage each other in discussion. Besides posting about news and events, members have shared links to clips from stage productions, interviews or podcasts, films, websites, pedagogical materials, and other media. In this sense, the group itself — which could be seen as microcosm of a larger, international Shakespearean community — actively transforms, reshapes, and refigures the field of Shakespearean studies itself, determining which approaches or areas of interest are foregrounded and which are not, forming a kind of grassroots movement from within. As in the model of "spreadability" referenced above, the circulation of information, ideas, and other media moves in various ways — bottom to top and also side to side, crisscrossing horizontally between members, especially through the use of tagging. This feature enables a user to embed another's name as a kind of "hyperlink" that serves as a shortcut connection to notify the person tagged, directing her or him to the post, thereby creating cross-references within status updates. The ease of tagging, along with the automatic appearance of the comment box underneath each post, facilitates engagement and coaxes users to communicate with each other. The only negative aspect of this circulation of material is the potential for one to feel overwhelmed by the amount of information constantly circulating on the group page. Group members may feel pressure to keep up with this ceaseless barrage of posts, to be in constant support of one another, to make sure not to miss someone's status update. As the group administrator, I have felt this pressure probably more than most, but I see it as part of the give-and-take that constitutes bonds between members of a community. Keeping up with the group postings and maintaining these relationships does indeed entail a great deal of effort, but for me, it is worth it.

REFLECTIONS ON "SHAKESPEARE FRIENDS"

Although I cannot claim that interactions on "Shakespeare Friends" have saved any lives, as in the cancer support groups that Santos describes, I can provide some feedback that indicates the group has benefited members in meaningful ways. Several of the members who responded to my inquiry about the group spoke positively about it as a resource for information, such as recent publications, calls for papers, upcoming film releases, live performances, and other events. And, all of those who responded to my inquiry wrote that much of the information has been extremely helpful for them. For many, including myself, numerous group posts have proved to be indispensable resources for my research and teaching. As one member has described it, "the threads work as informal or accidental archives of Shakespeare resources and news." Unfortunately, however, the use of group's postings as an archive is severely limited because of constraints built into Facebook itself which, as Morrison notes, functions entirely in the "perpetual present" (Morrison 2014, 120). Perhaps future incarnations of Facebook or another social media platform will provide us with the ability to store and search past threads more easily, so that this potential for the group to create rich and varied archives may be realized.

In their replies, many also mentioned that they find it especially helpful and even "inspiring" when members post about their own accomplishments, as it creates a "sense of optimism," as one respondent wrote, while another commented that she "enjoy[s] seeing what people are working on, the interconnectedness of ideas across the group." A couple of respondents also noted the benefit of being able to distribute their own work to supportive readers. These points were echoed by many members who gave me unsolicited, unprompted comments about the group in person at conferences I have attended since then. As another layer of coaxing, or I should say coaching, I make a point of nudging members to post news of their publications and other achievements, www.borrowers.uga.edu/1802/show 9/13 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation reassuring them that as long as they are supportive of others' work, there is nothing wrong with posting about their own, especially if they frame their news in such a way that it motivates others. I am pleased to see that this kind of sharing has proved beneficial to group members.

In addition to comments about content posted, most of those who provided feedback noted the tone or environment of the group. One person did say that he has found some of the comments on posts to be "unpleasantly edgy," a remark that may illustrate Morrison's point about coaxed affordances, how the platform of Facebook itself — in this case, the structure of the response box — influences what is written and how it is read. However, almost all of the others who responded said the opposite, claiming that the "Shakespeare Friends" group has been supportive and "appreciative," less given to the "negative tone" and "endless bickering" that they have witnessed on another Shakespeare internet site. One member noted that "unlike listservs, where there is an occasional flame war . . . I haven't seen that here," and another described "Shakespeare Friends" as "more supportive," with members "still wanting to debate or discuss issues, to disagree with each other, but without such harshness."

Importantly, in this "walled garden" of our group, we are removed from institutional pressures that dictate who does or does not have a say or stake in the academic, educational, or theatrical worlds of Shakespearean study. In our online community, boundaries and glass ceilings based on gender, race, class, professional status (e.g., high school teacher, professor, actor), and other distinctions are destabilized, constantly shifting. Thus, in our mini-networked public, although we may not be completely free of the hierarchies and barriers that exist outside of the group, we are not as restricted by them. Much less dominated by academic stars or elite institutions, our "walled garden" is comprised of a more diverse community, one that crosses over lines of privilege, areas of expertise, and individual rank or prestige. Notably, in her response to my inquiry, one Ph.D. student remarked that "Shakespeare Friends" has blurred the boundary between emerging and established scholars, changing the way in which she views academia and research. After realizing that many well-respected Shakespeareans not only posted information but also asked questions of the group made her feel less intimidated in relating to them. She noted that she was pleasantly surprised to find that "scholars I admire use social media in similar ways — and actually listen to my responses to their questions." She finds these exchanges to show that Shakespeareans, no matter the rank, have "recognition of and respect for the resources available to us in the expertise of our friends and acquaintances."

There might be a downside to this diverse community, for some graduate students may feel an unconscious pressure to participate competitively in the group, as if they are rehearsing for job interviews and other opportunities. However, I have not detected or had any sense that the posts from Ph.D. students are aiming for that audience or designed with that purpose in mind. In fact, at a previous Shakespeare Association of America meeting, one graduate student told me that although she feels anxious at conferences, as if she were auditioning for jobs, she does not feel that type of pressure within our networked community. In her unsolicited comments, she described her experience with "Shakespeare Friends" as more of a haven from that kind of stressful environment than an example of it.

In addition to upsetting traditional hierarchies and barriers, "Shakespeare Friends" crosses geographical boundaries, making it possible for members to exchange ideas with fellow Shakespeare scholars, educators, and practitioners all over the world. In effect, the group is a virtual microcosm of the global nature of contemporary Shakespeare studies. In one way or another, each member who responded to my post praised the group for allowing them to reach out to colleagues beyond their own universities or geographical locations. One member remarked that she enjoyed being able to "connect with other scholars outside of [her] home institution." Echoing that response, one member wrote, "I have made many connections that I would not have otherwise," while another explained that the group has enabled him to move outside of the parochial atmosphere at his institution, to avoid being "sucked in" to the "intense neutron star at its center." This member added that the group has helped him to reestablish relationships with colleagues he has known for many years and to stay in regular contact with others whom he has met only recently. Indeed, I have found the same to be the case with me. The active exchange with Shakespearean colleagues and friends both far and near has broadened my own horizons greatly and transformed my perspectives on Shakespeare and other aspects of my work and life, positively affecting my production as a scholar and effectiveness as a teacher. Through the group, I have emerged from a much more isolated life to one that is more actively engaged with others, as it has helped me to strengthen bonds with old friends and to embrace new ones. In the process, I have learned and grown immensely.

This ability to cross over geographical boundaries on Facebook is an invaluable feature, one that, perhaps, cancels out the less attractive aspects of its platform. One member pointed to the limitations of Facebook — that it "doesn't lend itself to longer, more thoughtful posts" — in his response to my inquiry. I would add that at least in comparison to other social media platforms, such as Twitter, Facebook's affordances do allow for relatively lengthy posts. I have observed a great disparity in the length and the depth of posts on Facebook, as the word count of statuses and comments most likely depends greatly on the social milieu of a particular group or circle of friends involved, along with the personality and writing practices of the individual user. Nonetheless, social media sites in general are not conducive to a fully developed or in-depth analysis of topics, but conversely function as an initiation of a dialogue, an invitation to conversation, a gesture toward more discussion.

In my own experience, when I have had a rich exchange of ideas with someone in the group, we have extended our communication elsewhere, via email or telephone. In their feedback, several members remarked that their participation in the group spilled out into www.borrowers.uga.edu/1802/show 10/13 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation other kinds of interactions. For instance, one member noted how she and I shared resources for teaching after she posted a link to her work on the group page. Many mentioned that they plan to visit with fellow group members in other contexts and environments. As one put it, after interacting with others on "Shakespeare Friends," she now will "look forward to seeing some of these friendly faces at upcoming conferences." I found it greatly rewarding to speak with members of the group I had not yet met in person at a past meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America. At the reception of this meeting a couple of years ago, following the establishment of "Shakespeare Friends," I was pleasantly surprised when a member of the group — one who, interestingly, has never posted on the page — said to me, "I feel like you are taking care of us all." Although I never set out to do any such thing when I created the group, I am quite happy now to be thought of as a facilitator of an online community that offers a supportive means of exchange between Shakespearean scholars, educators, or practitioners in theater or other arts.

Of course, there will be many alterations to "Shakespeare Friends," Facebook, and Social Media in the future as constant changes are made in the field of digital technology and culture. Facebook is now reported to be increasingly unpopular with young people — although I have not witnessed this trend myself, to be honest, as all my students and young scholars I encounter are active on Facebook — so I suspect that a new version of it or a new type of social media will soon emerge to take its place. Even though Twitter is popular, its features differ from those of Facebook to such a degree that the former could not completely replace the latter. I hope that whatever future platform does supplant Facebook will permit users to move effortlessly from the present to past archives, so that groups like this one can easily access past information and connect with fellow members about earlier posts. I also hope that in the future that there is even a higher level of active user participation in shaping digital media, in exploiting its "spreadability."

Along with these innovations, I am sure that we will continue to analyze the impact of social media on culture, relationships, and ourselves and to grapple with issues of privacy and other matters that we have yet to encounter. At this point in time, we have really just embarked on serious study of the platforms that have become indispensable to and inseparable from our daily lives. In any case, I plan to continue thinking critically about Web 2.0 and to transfer over what I have learned about interacting with mediated technology from "Shakespeare Friends" to whatever new form social media take. Mainly, I will focus on implementing the tools that digital communication offers us to reach out as best I can, to focus on the "saying," to establish face-to-face encounters with others.

NOTES 1. I am grateful to editors Maurizio Calbi and Stephen O'Neill for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article and to Christy Desmet and the editors and Borrowers and Lenders for their helpful feedback. 2. Cohen comments on the arguments of these critics, showing how they both begin from a deterministic position, even though they have opposing views of mediated technology as either "good" or "bad." (Cohen draws from an article by Introna that was forthcoming, which was later published in 2002.) Interestingly, Introna employs Levinas as support for his criticism of the internet, claiming that it separates people, disrupting the face-to-face connection upon which Levinas's theory is based. However, as Cohen explains and I show below, his views rely on a misreading of Levinas, particularly on his concept of "proximity" in this relationship. See Cohen 2000, 22-28. 3. For a full discussion of the ontology of digital media, particularly its binary code as a kind of elemental particle underlying all of its manifestations, see Evens 2012. 4. Santos discusses Deresiewicz's points at length in his article (Santos, 2011). 5. For a full discussion of Levinas's views on and references to Shakespeare, see Cohen, 2010, 150-68. 6. Levinas defines and develops the concept of "transcendence" and the "transcendent" throughout his career (see especially Emmanuel Levinas, Alterity and Transcendence [1999]). Briefly, Levinas employs the term to refer to the deeply rooted human need and ability to "transcend" the self and connect with the other in this life, not to a move beyond the material world, as in the usual sense of the word. As noted below, Levinas challenges traditional notions of the self that see it as locked in its own consciousness or ego. For more on Levinas's use of the term "transcendence," see Theodore de Boer, The Rationality of Transcendence: Studies in the Philosophy of Emmannuel Levinas (1977). 7. Beyond the relevance of his ideas to textual interpretation, Levinas's views on this dramatic universe may be linked to current applications of his thought in Shakespeare and appropriation studies. Alexa Huang and Elizabeth Rivlin's recent book collection, Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation (2014), employs Levinas's "face-to-face" theory, particularly the self's obligation to the other, to refigure ways of thinking about textual appropriation. As Huang and Rivlin aver, Levinas's thought yields "provocative implications . . . for the study of appropriations," for, as they explain, "both Shakespeare and its appropriations can be the actors and the acted upon, the self and the other, sometimes in the space of a single act" (Huang and Rivlin 2014, 4). 8. See note 2, above. 9. For a full discussion of the status box and coaxing performances in Facebook, see Morrison 2014, 120-25.

REFERENCES www.borrowers.uga.edu/1802/show 11/13 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Baym, Nancy K. 2010. Personal Connections in the Digital Age. Cambridge and Malden, Mass.: Polity Press. boyd, dana. 2011. "Social Network Sites as Networked Publics: Affordances, Dynamics, and Implications." In A Networked Self: Identity, Community, and Culture on Social Network Sites. Edited by Zizi A. Papacharissi. New York: Routledge. 39-58. Cohen, Richard A. 2010. Levinasian Meditations: Ethics, Philosophy, and Religion. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Cohen, Richard A. 2000. "Ethics and Cybernetics: Levinasian Reflections." Ethics and Information Technology 2: 27-35. De Boer, Theodore. 1977. The Rationality of Transcendence: Studies in the Philosophy of Emmannuel Levinas. Amsterdam: J. C. Gieben. Deresiewicz, William. 2009. "Faux Friendship." The Chronicle of Higher Education. 9 December. Available online at: http://chronicle.com/article/Faux-Friendship/49308/ (The%20Narcissism%20Epidemic:%20Living%20in%20the%20Age%20of%20Entitlement.%20New%20York:%20Free%20Books.) [accessed 1 February 2014]. Eliot, T. S. 1970. Collected Poems, 1909-1962. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World. Evens, Aden. 2012. "Web 2.0 and the Ontology of the Digital." DHQ 6.2. Available online at: http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/6/2/000120/000120.html (http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/6/2/000120/000120.html) [accessed 1 February 2014]. Hansen, Mark B. N. 2010a. Introduction to "Memory." By Bernard Stiegler. In Critical Terms for Media Studies. Edited by W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 64-87. Hansen, Mark B. N. 2010b. "New Media." In Critical Terms for Media Studies. Edited by W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 172-85. Huang, Alexa, and Elizabeth Rivlin, eds. 2014. Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation. New York: Palgrave. Introna, Lucas D. 2002. "The (Im)Possibility of Ethics in the Information Age." Information & Organization 12.2: 71-85. Jenkins, Henry, Joshua Green, and Sam Ford. 2013. Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in Networked Culture. New York: New York University Press. Levinas, Emmanuel. 2003. Humanism of the Other. Translated by Nidra Poller. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1999. Alterity and Transcendence. Translated by Michael B. Smith. New York: Columbia University Press. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1987. Time and the Other (and Additional Essays). Translated by Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1985. Ethics and Infinity. Translated by Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1978. Existence and Existents. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1974. Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Duquesne University Press. Morrison, Aimée. 2014. "Facebook and Coaxed Affordances." In Identity Technologies: Constructing the Self Online. Edited By Anna Poletti and Julie Rak. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Pinchevski, Amit. 2014. "Levinas as a Media Theorist: Toward an Ethics of Mediation." Philosophy and Rhetoric 47.1: 48-72. Santos, Marc. 2011. "How the Internet Saved My Daughter and How Social Media Saved My Family." Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy 15.2 (Spriang). Available online at: http://www.technorhetoric.net/15.2/topoi/santos/cancer_loss_change.html (http://www.technorhetoric.net/15.2/topoi/santos/cancer_loss_change.html) [accessed 1 February 2014]. Turkle, Sherry. 1995. Life on the Screen. New York: Simon and Schuster. Twenge, Jean M., and W. Keith Campbell. 2009. The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement. New York: Free Books.

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The Economics of (In)Attention in YouTube Shakespeare

(/current) CHRISTY DESMET, UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA

ABSTRACT (/archive) Economic metaphors have long been used as shorthand for the aesthetic, literary, cultural, or rhetorical value of Shakespearean appropriations: Shakespeare possesses and confers cultural capital; he is "big-time" art (Bristol 1996). Economic metaphors are also central to discussion of the cultural dynamics of Web 2.0: we live in an information economy and are driven by an economics of attention, as defined by Richard A. Lanham (2006). Since its founding in May 2005, YouTube has sought to exploit the economics of attention by linking "real" dollars to a video's ability to attract viewers. YouTube, however, has never been profitable, so that the economics of attention on the site has become a self-perpetuating phenomenon — artistic and social, without conferring capital. This essay suggests as well a further revision to YouTube's participation in the economics of attention. Particularly in the case of amateur YouTube Shakespeare appropriations, the site's dynamics operate through a dialectic between the art of creating and consuming attention structures and a residual resistance to the compulsion to get and give attention. Central to the experience of the bard on YouTube is a complementary economics of (in)attention.

YOUTUBE $$$$ Founded in 2005, YouTube was bought by Google on 9 October 2006 for $1.76 billion, an event that raised significantly economic expectations for the video-sharing site. But doubts about YouTube's ability to make money were raised early — as early as 2006. The site's economic strategy has been compared to that of Starbucks, which spends lavishly on interior decorating to provide a free hangout in which users are willing to pay premium prices for coffee; YouTube is like Starbucks, but without the coffee ("The trouble with YouTube" 2006). It provides free amenities to video uploaders but has nothing of its own to sell — no way to make "real" money.

A comparison between YouTube and rival Hulu in 2008 reported that "YouTube serves an enormous volume (reportedly 1 billion plus downloads a day) of small files (around 2.75 minutes on average) at a low ad-inventory fill ratio — only 3-4 of videos carry advertising at all — and low CPMs (around $10, if that)" — CPM being the cost outlay per one thousand views. ("How Does YouTube Make Money?" www.borrowers.uga.edu/783210/show 1/22 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2008)1 YouTube seemed poised to make money, if it had not done so so far. In 2009, however, Credit Suisse "estimated YouTube's operating losses" for the year "would reach $470 million" (Marsden 2009). In 2012, Korean artist Psy's instantly viral blockbuster, "Gangnam Style," garnered over 1 billion views and became "the most viewed video in the entire history of YouTube. Yet this has made Psy, the artist behind it, just $870,000 . . . This comes out to a measly 0.1 cents per viewing of the video" ("Economics of Being" 2012). The argument has been made that while YouTube may not make money, it supports the parent company Google by strengthening its data-gathering capabilities and indirectly by strengthening Google's bargaining position (through economic losses) with adversarial copyright holders.

Integration was taken a step further with the syncing of YouTube channels with Google+. But problems have persisted with the two-pronged mode in which advertisers funnel dollars to the video-sharing site, while YouTube supplies the advertisers with eyeballs (Farchy 2009). Between 2011 and 2013, consequently, YouTube had begun moving toward a more traditional economic model, creating privileged partners who earn large advertising dollars and produce viral videos.2 At the same time, YouTube made overtures to Hollywood aimed at including copyrighted content and targeted independent filmmakers for seed grants. In 2013, YouTube was preparing to move further into a traditional economic arrangement by offering subscription channels ("YouTube preparing" 2013). But not that much has changed. In 2016, it is easy to find websites and YouTube videos explaining how to make money via the Tube. On 10 August 2015, for instance, the website Bustle offered an article explaining how professional YouTubers — those who make their living in this medium — make their money (Kachroo-Levine 2015); subscriptions to the creators' channels and organized opportunities for donations were important factors in the economics of YouTube. A short piece in Business Insider (Jacobs 2014) also chronicled the independent YouTubers who were gathering the most money. But while the buzz over YouTube entrepreneurs persists, profits apparently have not increased for the company. The Wall Street Journal, in its 2015 assessment of YouTube's financial health, reported that YouTube accounted for about 6% of Google's general income in 2014, but did not contribute to its earnings: "After paying for content, and the equipment to deliver speedy videos, YouTube's bottom line remains 'roughly break even,'" according to the Journal's source (Winkler 2015).

THE ECONOMICS OF ATTENTION While YouTube may not be profitable according to traditional economic standards, it can and has been argued that the site works according to what Richard A. Lanham has called the "economics of attention." In an information economy, according to Lanham's formulation, we are drowning in information: what is in short supply is "the human attention needed to make sense of it all" (Lanham 2006, xi). This scarce attention, furthermore, is orchestrated by pattern and design — or style, in the traditional canons of rhetoric. There is a figure-ground reversal in which content becomes subsidiary to form, and as Steve Jobs recognized clearly in his development of the iPhone and other Apple products, "design, in such a world, becomes as important as the engineering of the object" (Lanham 2006, 16).3 The attention economy thus privileges aesthetics and style over a goods-based economy, "thinking about" information over raw data — in Lanham's memorable phrase, "fluff" over "stuff." In this paradigm, the economists of attention are no longer those sober, numbers-minded experts we associate with an economy of "stuff," but visual artists such as Christo, whose artwork is an allegory of human behavior and motivation, or the designers of computer interfaces (15, 17) — or teenagers playing Hamlet and Ophelia, Bollywood-style ("Hamlet Bollywood Love Scene" 2009).4

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YouTube, with its motto of "Broadcast Yourself," stakes its claim to fame on the economics of attention. In a 2006 lecture, YouTube cofounder Jawed Karim characterized the site as a place where a "good idea" can garner millions of users for the most amateur of video uploaders: he cited the early, very unpolished video "Dance" by Matt Harding as a good example (Karim 2006). The top attention- grabbing video of 2012, however, was Psy's highly polished "Gangnam Style," the first video ever to top 1 billion views, which went viral in the U.S. only one week after Korea and reached the 1-billion mark within five months ("Gangnam Style Makes YouTube History" 2012; Allocca 2012b; Shifman 2013, 1). There follow, in order, Walk Off the Earth's cover of "Somebody That I Used to Know" with a crowd- sourced, five-person guitar accompaniment; Carley Rae Jepsen's "Call Me Maybe"; and "Barack Obama vs Mitt Romney," part of the Epic Rap Battles from Maker, one of YouTube's principal partners (see Allocca 2012a; "YouTube in Rewind: What you were watching in 2012"). Most of these top-trending videos were from commercial artists, and some were explicitly created for YouTube. Psy was one of the first artists to become a sensation exclusively through YouTube. A search of the YouTube Trends site on 16 May 2016 foregrounds analysis of the popularity of nominees for British Breakthrough Artist in the BRIT Awards for the best in British music, emphasizing the continuum between YouTube and the broader world of commercial music.5 Between 2012 and 2016, we have come a long way from the amateur sphere epitomized by YouTube's inaugural video, co-founder Jawed Karim's nineteen-second effort, "Me at the Zoo" (Karim 2005).

Shakespeare videos on YouTube, either professional or amateur, have never met these same benchmarks for popularity and viral distribution. They inhabit, instead, the space that Alexandra Juhasz calls the "niche Tube" (2011), pockets of specialized content that can be found on the site by those looking for it or attracted to it in passing. But in this niche market, "big time" or professional Shakespeare tends to dominate. Perhaps the most widely known and frequently viewed Shakespeare videos are the Sassy Gay Friend (SGF) series. From searches conducted for the same uploaded video on 4 February 2013 and 17 www.borrowers.uga.edu/783210/show 3/22 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation May 2016, here are the tallies:

17 May 2016 13 February 2013 Romeo and Juliet 7,948,548 views 6,483,376 views posted on 8 March 2010 Hamlet 7,190,292 views 6,229,828 views posted on 17 February 2010 Othello 3,779,994 views 3,287,135 views posted on 28 March 2010

SGF is a commercial creation, in effect an advertisement for the Second City Network, whose channel hosts the videos; originally, they were used to promote Second City's training centers, which teach students how to do improv. Brian Gallivan, the actor behind Sassy Gay Friend, says that he created the character back in 2004 for a show I was doing as part of the main stage cast at The Second City in Chicago. I wanted to do something with Shakespearean characters and ended up yelling at some of them about their poor life choices. ("A Minute with . . . The Sassy Gay Friend" 2011) He later began doing advertisements for Kraft Foods, moving from the economy of "fluff" to that of "stuff." In the case of Sassy, as on the application at large, the economics of attention seemed to be working with a more traditional economic model: professional YouTubers court eyeballs with the intention of selling services, tickets, or some other tangible commodity. Videos affiliated with well- known and well-organized institutions, such as with the Royal Shakespeare Company, are the second strongest group in terms of views and page rank. On 4 February 2013, as well, Romeo and Juliet footage (of the "balcony scene," outtakes from onstage, New York, posted 5 July 2011) had 52,106 views. Hamlet, posted on 23 February, had 51,798 views). Here, the economic benefit seems to be related to branding and, no doubt, to the institution's economic muscle in courting the YouTube algorithm to move its videos up the rankings. The numbers of views — indeed, the basic availability of plays in the YouTube archive — also seem to be affected by the curricular status of the Shakespeare play; a beautiful trailer of the RSC's Winter's Tale, for instance, paled next to Romeo and Juliet in terms of numbers of views. Star power — for instance, David Tennant as Hamlet — of course adds additional currency to any video: one fan-uploaded clip of Tennant doing "To be or not to be" received 8,890 views between 2010 and 2016 ("Hamlet - To be or not to be - David Tennant" 2010).6 (Compare this, however, with the 3,682,998 views earned by the video below it in my page rank on 30 April 2016, "The Tenth Doctor Regenerates" [2012], also starring Tennant in his previous role as Dr. Who.)7 Consistently, professional Shakespeare videos earn more views than amateur productions.

Other videos, particularly the more amateur kind that I consider to be the heart of YouTube Shakespeare, belong to the second general category of video on YouTube identified by Jean Burgess and Joshua Green: for the YouTubers we are considering, the Tube operates not as a "top-down" platform for "the distribution of popular culture," but as a "bottom-up" platform for "vernacular creativity" (Burgess and Green 2009, 6). Within this amateur context, there are a few notable examples of YouTube Shakespeare that enjoy both longevity and an impressive number of views. Take, for instance, the 8,976,369 views earned between 2007 and 2016 by the fan-video "Sacrifice" (2007), featuring Leonardo DiCaprio as Romeo and Claire Danes as Juliet. A search on 30 April 2016 turned up a note of appreciation to fans from video's creator, who was clearly bemused and gratified by its success.8

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More often — particularly in examples from youth culture — the videographers' generally brief commitment to their art, the simple passage of time, and both YouTube's business model and the machinations of its algorithm prevent Shakespeare videos from gaining any significant traction in the attention economy of YouTube. We can get some sense of the audience dynamics for youth culture videos from the case of "Hamlet Star Wars Parody" (2006). The video was first posted on 20 February 2006; when I checked in April 2013, it had received 32,600 views; by 30 April 2016, the view count had grown to 35,968 and moved upward slightly to 35,981 views by 3 May. The video is witty, and obviously indebted to Monty Python. Its production values are simple but effective, and the garbled Star Wars voices are worthy of a laugh. The whole gestalt is endearing in a juvenile sort of way, and there is some evidence that the video has participated both directly and indirectly in an ongoing attention economy. For instance, the long-rolling film credits pilfered from the parent film quickly became a trope lifted for their own use by other teen videographers.

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It might not be too much to say that the film contributed to a growing genre of Star Wars parody, which includes the adorable "Jedi Kittens Strike Back" (2011). But while "Hamlet Star Wars Parody" may participate in the attention economy with some success at 35,981 views, its popularity still pales next to that of "Jedi Kittens," which on 3 May 2016 had received 20,819,586 views.

THE ECONOMICS OF (IN)ATTENTION ON YOUTUBE SHAKESPEARE Within the context of YouTube's general attention economy, Shakespeare videos enjoy only a modest share. Within the niche market of Shakespeare on YouTube, amateur videos are marginalized further.9 Yet what has happened and continues to happen with amateur Shakespeare videos can tell us something generally about the dynamics of YouTube as a social media site. Since Lanham has argued that the rhetorical "economics of attention" is at odds with the reigning models of capitalist economies that generally drive the Internet, I will suggest that the second term in Lanham's "economics of attention" may also need reconsideration in the case of the amateur, usually youth-oriented Shakespeare productions on YouTube. Stephen O'Neill, whose Shakespeare and YouTube is now the standard text on this subject, acknowledges the relevance of Lanham's theory to the attention economy of YouTube Shakespeares, but also recognizes its limitations for YouTube as an application: The model of attention- savvy user involves considerable demands, envisioning as it does a viewer that sifts through the abundant flow of information with curiosity and openness. Such an ideal viewer might combat what has been regarded as the circularity many YouTube users experience as they move from euphoria at unanticipated discoveries to "entropy," the sense of "ennui" caused by repetition, disruption, and distraction that was first observed by Thomas Elsaesser (Elsaesser 2009; O'Neill 2014, 33). My essay is not so much interested in the affects of euphoria and ennui as in the oscillations between "at" and "through" vision that govern Lanham's economics of attention. It proposes a dialectic between attention and a lack of attention that arguably informs the production and consumption of these amateur YouTube Shakespeares. Key factors affecting what I hope to argue is a complementary economics of (in)attention are: curation and consumption, invention, and community. www.borrowers.uga.edu/783210/show 6/22 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation

CURATION AND CONSUMPTION When the Web moved to being a repository of content pushed to passive viewers (Web 1.0) to a venue for active creation (Web 2.0), the creator/viewer's role in curating the archives around which Web 2.0 applications are built grew in importance. YouTube began as a crowd-sourced, variable archive that was established largely on the fly by users of all descriptions: entrepreneurs rubbed shoulders with common citizens and students. YouTube-as-archive therefore lacks the intentional selection and scaffolding associated with site-specific artistic and scholarly curation. While this homemade quality to the YouTube archive, fostered by the prevalence of curation by bricolage, proved hospitable to amateur videos, these may have been squeezed out subsequently as professional Shakespeare companies adopt YouTube as an outlet for publicity and the YouTube algorithm moves these well-orchestrated efforts up the page-rank hierarchy.

A key actor in the creator-application-viewer triad is the hidden YouTube algorithm, which the company tweaks constantly to influence access to individual videos. As Kevin Slavin (2011) has argued in his influential TED talk, algorithms that use math "to decide stuff" "talk" primarily to one another, and are, in effect, unreadable by human beings. Eli Pariser's (2011) study of the "filter bubble" analyzes as well the way in which algorithms shape — indeed, limit — the transmission of information between human beings. YouTube's promotion of favored channels to partner status and the advent of subscription channels continued to direct viewers' attention toward established, official sources. Finally, as Bernardo Huberman (2009) writes, the "law of surfing," dependent on a viewer's attention span and purposes in consulting YouTube, predicts that most users will not look beyond one page of hits, and consequently, many videos will never have an audience.10 Thus, the heft of well-managed institutional channels pushes amateur and youth culture efforts further out in the "long tail" of popularity and disrupts the threading of videos.11 The centralization of channels has also reinforced the filter-bubble effect.

The filter-bubble effect seems true for YouTube Shakespeare. My search on "Romeo and Juliet" in 2013, for instance, produced some interference from Prokofiev, Tchaikovsky, and Dire Straits, but for the most part page one was populated by clips from the Luhrmann and Zeffirelli films; a string of pop- music threaded videos led back to Luhrmann by way of the music contributed to that film by Radiohead or to Zeffirelli by way of Henry Mancini's "Love Theme." I was on page seven before I encountered a school project. The same search produced comparable results in 2016, although there appears on page 2 a clearly amateur Romeo and Juliet trailer using clips of Jack and Elsa from Frozen over dialogue from the Paul Giamatti film starring Hailee Steinield ("Romeo and Juliet Trailer" 2014). Amateurism is not dead in 2016, but all in all, the YouTube Shakespeare landscape had become more "enclosed" by the application's search engine — to use an early modern metaphor — than was it was between 2006 and 2009.

In the case of amateur YouTube Shakespeares, the site's architecture and algorithm interfere with as much as they support the attention economy. But the concept of an attention economy contradicts itself. Lanham's concept of the economics of attention takes for granted the importance of human motive in both the creation and reception of digital artifacts. That is not to say that he privileges serious purpose or authorial intention in the traditional sense. His matrix of factors that can trigger the oscillation between "at" and "through" vision that governs attention-getting and giving involves many agents — the creator, certainly, and the audience, but also formal patterns that inhere in the artifacts themselves, and the quirky operations of chance. Yet while Lanham sees human behavior as driven by a wide range of motives, from competition to play to high seriousness, the model is still humanistic, not post-human. The conceptual artist Christo, enacting the drama of setting up his Running Fence through the stunningly beautiful landscape of Marin County, California is an artist of attention structures. It is more difficult to www.borrowers.uga.edu/783210/show 7/22 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation see the YouTube algorithm as an artist or attention economist; it also more difficult to include within Lanham's concept of aleatory chance the myriad accidents and behaviors that influence not only the appearance and disappearance of videos on YouTube, but also their desecration and degeneration. How, for instance, would one characterize the "rich mix of motives" that produce this event, YouTube's notification that a soundtrack has been disabled because of copyright violation? Sony's corporate greed or the videographer's ennui might be partly to blame. But also at work are the automatic protocols of YouTube's audio-fingerprinting software, set against the creator's possible lack of knowledge about what had happened to her video. Lanham's emphasis on human attention as the driving force behind his digital economy does not stretch far enough to account for the full range of actors at work in the assemblage that is YouTube. As Thomas Elsaesser writes, "You Tube is a user-generated-content site where nonetheless a certain structured contingency obtains" (Elsaesser 2009, 181). This "structured contingency" is, on the one hand, strongly informed and shaped by mathematics, via the site's programming architecture and design. On the other hand, the chaos of human creativity, eccentricity, and self-importance "prevails" (181). In an environment saturated with such "constructive instability" (169), as Elsaesser says, we need a rhetoric that embraces not only chance, but what lies beyond chance — collapse and failure.

INVENTION Sixty-three percent of videos uploaded to YouTube involve snippets of material originally produced for a venue other than YouTube (Ding et al. 2011). This observation holds true as well for YouTube Shakespeares. The majority of amateur Shakespeare videos uploaded to YouTube, in particular, involve either direct appropriation of footage "out there" on the web or remix. The most interesting among these appropriations work according to the dynamics of memeticism. Limor Shifman (2012) defines a memetic video, as opposed to a viral video, as a "popular clip that lures extensive creative user engagement in the form of parody, pastiche, mash-ups, or other derivative work. Such derivatives employ two main mechanisms in relating to the 'original' memetic video: imitation (parroting elements from a video) and re-mix (technologically-afforded re-editing of the video)" (2012, 190, emphasis in original; see also Shifman 2013). This definition fits particularly well the kind of amateur videos that have energized YouTube Shakespeare most strongly. A search on "Lego Macbeth," for instance, brings up a well- ordered genealogy of videos that are similar enough to one another to constitute a Shakespearean genre (see Desmet 2014, 53-55).

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Macbeth in Lego! 2011

Macbeth Lego: The Movie 2009

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Lego Macbeth 2009

Lego Macbeth 2016 The LEGO Macbeths keep on coming, perhaps not at the fever pitch of 2008-2009, but there is still, in 2016, a steady stream created to fulfill class assignments.12 At their best, as some of the examples curated by Luke McKernan's curated site Bardbox (McKernan 2016) attest, YouTube Shakespeares demonstrate "extensive creative user engagement" and attract a degree of admiring attention. Still, the cards are heavily stacked against one of these videos gaining traction in YouTube's overall attention economy. As Bernardo Huberman (2009) argues, the law of surfing not only concentrates by mechanical means the economics of viewer attention, but also has a chilling effect on uploading activity itself: www.borrowers.uga.edu/783210/show 10/22 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation YouTube's data set revealed that the productivity of those uploading videos strongly depends on attention, as measured by the number of downloads. Conversely, a lack of attention leads to a decrease in the number of videos uploaded and a consequent drop in productivity. (Huberman 2009, 63) Lack of eyeballs creates a lack of interest in continuing the cultural conversation.

While the combined effect of many factors — from the YouTube algorithm to its business model and consumers' tendency toward casual "surfing" — work against the establishment of a canon in the Shakespeare niche, the videographers themselves are in part responsible for the disarray of its attention economy. Amateur YouTube Shakespeareans are notoriously sloppy about including the tags and metadata that allow for systematic threading of videos and make possible the phenomenon that Patricia Lange has called "videos of affinity" (Lange 2009; see also Desmet 2014, 56-58), which are motivated by an intense desire to "talk back" to a previous videographer.13 Amateur YouTube Shakespeareans, indifferent to fame and distracted easily from Shakespeare as a topic, confirm Alexandra Juhasz's conclusion that while "online documentary presentation on YouTube disturbs many binaries — public/private, self/other, male/female" to "initiat[e] connections inconceivable without the technology," it is also true that "YouTube closes down the construction of coherent communities and returns production, consumption, and meaning-making to the isolated individual, reestablishing the reign of the self" ("Isolation/Connection," Juhasz 2011). As discussed below, these disjunctions and gaps work against any sense of community, despite the fact that young videographers enthusiastically court subscribers, "likes," and comments.14

Last and not least, YouTube Shakespeareans of the amateur kind, at least according to my experience, tend to be casual about their craft. In a few cases, video producers report that a perfunctory assignment took on a life of its own ("this started out as an English project, but we really got into it and spent five days filming"). But more often, they brag about their short production schedule ("we did this in two hours!"). Finally, despite YouTube's effort to educate its participants about ownership and fair use, Shakespeare YouTubers can be equally off-hand about the details of copyright ("I own none of this"; "No copyright infringement intended!"). They belong to the world of "remix" (Lessig 2008), but in a particularly insouciant way, and so their videos are subject to a fairly high rate of attrition for copyright infringement. In many ways, invention in YouTube Shakespeare — whimsical, ephemeral, and occasionally perfunctory — involves inattentiveness as much as an economics of getting and giving attention.

COMMUNITY Another factor complicating attempts to assess YouTube Shakespeare as a cultural scene is the changing nature of the concept of "community," for both the application and the Shakespeare sector. At the time when the first wave of Shakespeare videos flourished, YouTube was, in effect, a world unto itself; videos, appended comments, the threaded videos recommended by the search engine all coalesced to create something that was at once a unified digital artifact and an elastic focus of community response and reaction in different modes. This structure reinforced and was supported by the general sense that "the" YouTube community operated like the participatory cultures analyzed by Henry Jenkins (1992). For instance, Star Wars fan-fic groups remixed and reworked the series and engaged vigorously with one another in real time by digital means. Not all of YouTube has lost this centripetal focus. For instance, the "It Gets Better" video series initiated in 2010 that was inspired by a string of well-publicized gay teen suicides has formal coherence (the videos followed a common set of rhetorical protocols). They also respond directly to one another via the comments function, often challenging the makers Dan and Terry's blindness to issues of class and a tendency toward hetero-normativity emerging from the project; www.borrowers.uga.edu/783210/show 11/22 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation these comments to individual videos are equally centripetal, with relatively little linking outward.15 The comment exchanges also seemed to center around a group that if not without its differences, at least was defined at that moment by a common set of issues.

By contrast, YouTube Shakespeareans often address themselves to a general, rather ill-defined audience. There are some heart-felt statements of "thank you" aimed at the sponsoring literature teacher. But most of the comments appended to the current crop of "Lego Macbeth" videos, for instance, sound like this: "This is a project a few other people and I had to put together for our senior english class"; or, more assertively, "First movie i've ever made. ever. Please comment, rate and subscribe." The comments are impersonal but cheery and display a healthy insouciance and self-confidence. Perhaps most important, they express little angst about communication and community.

Complicating the scene further is the tendency, especially among amateurs, to use YouTube simply as a platform for sharing work, whether in response to an assignment or as a convenient place to stash videos for cataloguing and sometimes display in other venues (see Jenkins et al. 2016, 8). The communities these uploaders want to reach are constituted, by contrast, largely outside the digital realm of YouTube, in meatspace rather than cyberspace. They are friends, teachers, parents, and, as an afterthought, an idealized vision of random surfers who will undoubtedly love their work. This probably explains why YouTube uploaders are so resolutely uninterested in numbers of views, and with the fame and fortune that often follows from capturing social attention.

YOUTUBE AS MEMORY THEATER: THE EXAMPLE OF SLEEP NO MORE What, finally, is the effect of a dialectic between attention and (in)attention in the (amateur) YouTube Shakespeare community? A good example of how YouTube's double nature as personal archive and communal social media site affects the attention economy is provided by the activity there around Punchdrunk's immersive theater happening Sleep No More, in part an appropriation of Macbeth, which has been playing in New York from 2011 to 2016. Like YouTube itself, Sleep No More mixes commercialism with amateur art; the ethos is of a haunted house on literary steroids, but tickets have gone for over $100 apiece, with performances sold out months in advance. This site-specific, face-to-face experience enhanced with visual effects, music, and edgy "one-on-one" encounters with the actors, has the quality of "liveness," to use Philip Auslander's (2008) term for performance in a "mediatized" world. The experience of each audience member, itself carefully scripted but endlessly varied, invites repeat visits and a great deal of virtual chatter.

Sleep No More is all about the attention economy. People are free to wander about the dark interior of the McKittrick Hotel, while the various displays — ranging from a meticulous collection of keys in the hotel office to the surprising sight of a stag anchored in salt in another room — compete for visitors' attention. At the same time, the experience is by necessity incomplete. Visitors inevitably will miss some rooms altogether and may choose to ignore others. Another drama of attention-structures plays out between spectators and actors. Visitors are hidden behind anonymous (and uncomfortable) white masks, which is disorienting; the elevator operators who usher clients into the space often attempt to break up groups, and any effort to reunite with friends by cellphone earns a stern reprimand from the ushers who keep order in the place (see "Sleep No More immersive theatrical experience in New York" 2014). The spectators are to look but not talk, to focus their attention on the exhibits and on the actors who come and go and behave in startling, often inexplicable ways. At the same time, audience members make a game of trying to attract the players' attention and, with luck, earn one of the infamous one-on-one experiences in private with a performer.16 The web is full of advice about what actors to follow and how to catch their eye. www.borrowers.uga.edu/783210/show 12/22 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Sleep No More chroniclers on YouTube, in their effort to preserve and communicate to others their experience of this immersive drama, also participate in the attention economy. In 2011, one could find on YouTube reviews surreptitiously filmed by customers (e.g., "Sleep No More: 530 W 27th Street, New York, NY" 2011); one could also find recordings of celebrity sightings ("Pink at Sleep No More" 2011). But most important and interesting, there followed on YouTube efforts to recreate for a broader audience the necessarily eccentric experience of attending a live performance of Sleep No More. These tribute videos are both physically imbricated with that theatrical experience and distant from it, immediate as personal experiences and hypermediated through the sampled visual and musical tidbits used to create them.17

Reproducing the experience of "being there" at the McKittrick hotel, however, offers many challenges. Not only is the experience ephemeral and by definition, variable, but for a long time Sleep No More's bureaucracy controlled tightly the circulation of images and other materials; in 2012, for instance, Borrowers and Lenders editor Matt Kozusko could not get permission to reprint certain images from the $20 performance program. But following a lavish slide show in The New York Times, memorial or tribute videos based on that slide show soon began to appear.18 At the same time, other amateur as well as professional news venues began publishing more images from Sleep No More (see, for instance, Carr 2011).

Once there were a sufficient number of high-quality images available for appropriation, Sleep No More mashups made from these images and sound clips ripped from DVDs became possible, and they proliferated. Emursive, the company that produced and continues to produce (for a brief time longer) Sleep No More, adapted to this inevitable proliferation of visual and aural information about the production by cooperating with it. A 2012 video by Miguel Angel Herrerias (aka Miguel Sagaz) provided pictures and film clips, as well as an interview with the actor who at that time played Macbeth (Herrerias 2012). Images of Sleep No More are now all over Pinterest, and a Google image search conveniently gathers them together for the casual user.

Pinterest Board for Sleep No More The official Sleep No More website itself now offers a video trailer for viewing and animated GIFs and images for downloading or sharing on social media. At the same time, the Gift Shop offers, in addition to the $20 full-color program, gift packages of dinner and show that range from $220 to $500 and some rather pricey SNM "Special Edition" playing cards (Sleep No More 2016).

www.borrowers.uga.edu/783210/show 13/22 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation We have come full circle, perhaps, with the economics of attention married once again to the capitalist economy that fuels the SNM engine. But the collected YouTube tributes, which still populate the YouTube archive, have a different social function. The virtual traces of Sleep No More on YouTube work something like the memory theater of the early modern period, in which rhetors "placed" different images that encapsulated ideas and feelings in an imagined architectural space in order to retrieve them later for argument and performance. To offer an updated analogy, Sleep No More on YouTube resembles nothing so much as the Disney-type "ride" established by digital entrepreneurs in Cory Doctorow's novel Makers (2009). This "ride" is constructed by visitors who leave behind commemorative artifacts that are meaningful to them and that then become part of the next set of riders' own experience. The topography of the ride is ever-shifting, reconstituted moment by moment not only by visitors to the home base in Florida but also by the collective visitations of devotees at mirror rides around the globe that are linked digitally to one another. It is a crowd-sourced, highly fluid memory palace that is partly digital, partly embodied, and highly dispersed as a network. These same qualities characterize the social function of Sleep No More materials on YouTube.

The function of Sleep No More offerings on YouTube as a memory theater is consistent with the function of more highbrow contributions from such institutions as the Royal Shakespeare Company. Kate Rumbold (2010), for instance, has discussed how the increased participation of cultural institutions such as the Royal Shakespeare Company in virtual venues supports public and personal memory. The contributions of Sleep No More's intense fans, however, also trace their genealogy to the amateur culture that sustained YouTube Shakespeare in its first instantiation and continues to do so. Because they fly beneath the radar as mild paparazzi (as in the case of the Pink sighting) or as stealth photographers (in the case of the Andrew photos), the Sleep No More aficionados posting on YouTube partake in the same participatory spirit as the LEGO Macbeth creators. And although the crowd-sourced research into the multimedia sources behind the Sleep No More experience is far beyond that ever conducted by any LEGO Shakespeareans and the production values were much higher (see, for instance, Ricci 2012), the creative energy of this small, decentralized YouTube community — ranging beyond YouTube to the blogosphere and down into Manhattan's physical terrain — resembles that of the first generation of YouTube amateur artists.

By 2016, Sleep No More's memory theater is a palace in ruins, more like the crumbling amphitheater in which Leonardo DiCaprio takes Tybalt's life in the Baz Luhrmann film of Romeo + Juliet than the dignified structures of Renaissance memory practice. There are a few recent videos posted, but most are from, at best, three to four years ago. Some that I consulted in 2013 are still there. "AndrewAndrew," the intrepid pair who did their "investigative reporting" with nothing more than an iPhone 4, remain available for viewing ("Sleep No More: 530 W 27th Street, New York, NY" 2011); the most recent comments on their video, however, are all from three or four years ago. Available also is the appearance of Pink at a performance mentioned above, which on 3 May 2016 had 800 views but absolutely no comments.

By contrast, the trailer that is posted on Sleep No More's website, which was also posted on YouTube in 2014, received an appreciative comment as recently as 2 May 2016, while five months previously another fan had begged the show to go on the road to Singapore. Still, other, older posts also have received recent occasional comments and testimonials. The ups and downs of the SNM cult, the lax self-policing of the videographers themselves, who may abandon their creations but not destroy them, and the ongoing trickle of curious surfers and latter-day Sleep No More fans, combine to create a legacy archive that testifies at once to the operations of attention structures and a total disregard for attention on this loosely constructed YouTube Shakespeare collection.

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CONCLUSION I chose the phrase economics of (in)attention for this essay's title as a corrective to the "economics of attention" in order to acknowledge the transience, insouciance, and vagrant attention span underlying the hacker's ethics of expedience, all of which are at work in amateur YouTube Shakespeare. An economics of inattention is congenial, as well, to the conflicting forces that shape (and disrupt) YouTube as archive and social media site. In much social science and media scholarship about YouTube as a digital medium, "economics" remains largely a quantitative science, with eyeballs simply substituting for dollars; it is "serious" business.

Lanham's rhetorically inflected idea of economics, by contrast, is more aware of the machinations of chance, the stray thought, the serendipitous search, and a broader spirit of play and game in the vagaries of attention. His economics of attention attends to a range of motives far afield from the serious purposiveness that governs most discussions of an economics of attention. So perhaps I am arguing that the economics of (in)attention is a largely unacknowledged part of, rather than the opposite of, an economics of attention, and that it necessarily plays a larger role in the posthuman field of YouTube studies than Shakespeareans who study processes and artifacts of adaptation are accustomed to. As Stephen O'Neill writes of YouTube's posthuman quality: "When we look closely at YouTube, it presents a set of oppositions, which blend into continuums. These include copiousness and limitation; chaos and control; humans and machines (or users and the algorithm); the serendipity of video surfing and algorithmic sorting; professional and amateur; [and] consumer and producer" (O'Neill 2014, 2). To broadcast oneself as an amateur appropriator of Shakespeare on YouTube is to participate in a messy field of production and reception with many agents, not all of whom are paying attention at any given moment, and to encounter others who have arrived belatedly, or perhaps by accident.

NOTES 1. In the "Statistics" section of its official website, YouTube offers updated information about partner rules from advertising and earnings from copyright fees to rights-holders. See https://www.youtube.com/yt/press/statistics.html (https://www.youtube.com/yt/press/statistics.html). 2. Leading up to the first phase of this study, one partner, "Maker," put out around 300 videos a month at a cost of around $1000 apiece and got about 500 million views within the same time frame. Advertisers pay up "up to $10 per thousand views for video ads that precede the featured content" ("Economics behind" 2012). See also "YouTube's Premium-Content Strategy Starts to Take Shape" 2011; "Top 5 YouTube Partner Channels Ranked on Unique U.S. Viewers — May 2012 (Total)" 2012; and "Transitioning ads.youtube.com to AdWords for video" 2012. 3. This focus on design as a principal concern of business, coupled with Jobs's well-known flair for focusing media attention on himself and his products, are vividly exemplified in Walter Isaacson's biography of him (2011).

www.borrowers.uga.edu/783210/show 15/22 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 4. Another difference between YouTube and the artists discussed by Lanham is the participation of minors in its attention economy, which adds new complications. YouTube asks the posters of video to confirm that they are at least thirteen years of age. See "Ability to Accept Terms of Service": "You affirm that you are either more than 18 years of age, or an emancipated minor, or possess legal parental or guardian consent, and are fully able and competent to enter into the terms, conditions, obligations, affirmations, representations, and warranties set forth in these Terms of Service, and to abide by and comply with these Terms of Service. In any case, you affirm that you are over the age of 13, as the Service is not intended for children under 13. If you are under 13 years of age, then please do not use the Service. There are lots of other great web sites for you. Talk to your parents about what sites are appropriate for you" (https://www.youtube.com/static?gl=CAamp;template=terms (https://www.youtube.com/static? gl=CA&template=terms)). The YouTube researcher is also faced with the ethical issues attendant on conducting research with minors. Those issues are analyzed at length in this issue by Valerie Fazel, "Researching YouTube Shakespeare: Literary Scholars and the Ethical Challenges of Social Media." 5. See YouTube Trends: https://youtube-trends.blogspot.ie/search?updated-max=2016-03-15T13:00:00- 04:00&max-results=4 (https://youtube-trends.blogspot.ie/search?updated-max=2016-03-15T13:00:00- 04:00&max-results=4). 6. As a footnote, the Sassy Gay Friend videos did gain a significant number of views between 2013 and 2016, with Othello generating the least and Romeo and Juliet the greatest interest, which might suggest the continuing influence of secondary school curricula on YouTube Shakespeare. 7. On 8 May 2016, the copy of the Hamlet soliloquy that had earned the largest number of views had earned only 100,021. 8. It is impossible to determine with certainty the reason for this video's continued appeal. I think that is a particularly well-crafted example of its genre, but as Stephen O'Neill points out in a private communication, DiCaprio's later performances in The Great Gatsby (2013) and The Revenant (2015), which sustain his celebrity status, may also draw views to his earlier performance as Romeo. Again, it is also wise to remember the influence of school curricula may have on YouTube Shakespeare's production and consumption. 9. When I ran a searching on trending videos on 23 May 2016, the first "Shakespeare" video I found that might be considered an amateur production, "Episode 1: The Real Housewives of Shakespeare" (2016), was published 12 March 2016 and had, since that time, gained 10,157 views. 10. See Huberman 2009, p. 64 ff: "Another problem stems from the finite number of items that a user can attend to in a given time interval." For social users, the "the law of surfing" states that the probability of a user accessing a number of Web pages in a single session markedly decays with the number of pages, thereby constraining the amount of information that ever gets explored in a single surfing session. A typical user seldom visits pages beyond the first one displaying search results; consequently, a page ranked near the bottom by a search engine is unlikely to be viewed by many users." 11. The concept of the "long tail" comes from Wired's Chris Anderson (2008). For a dissenting thesis that "more than 47% of uploaders attract more than 1,000 uploader views, implying that YouTube uploaders enjoy good visibility, for those who upload a very small number of videos," see Ding et al. 2011, 363. 12. The LEGO film, and Shakespeare's appearance in that movie as one of the master builders, probably has sustained, and perhaps strengthened, the association of LEGO with Shakespeare. That LEGO deliberately capitalizes on the connection is suggested by the fact that the company published on its YouTube channel a video of LEGO Shakespeare scenes to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death ("LEGO® LEGO Wherefore art thou LEGO . . ." 2016). 13. You'll never find a Shakespearean, for instance, adding "porn" to a list of keywords just in order to entice more traffic, although a few uploaders who are more interested in pop culture and less in Shakespeare per se have done so. I have written about this topic in relation to postings of the Beatles' "Pyramus and Thisbe" in Desmet, "YouTube Shakespeare" (2014). www.borrowers.uga.edu/783210/show 16/22 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 14. The question of whether YouTube creates community or estrangement remains unresolved. For the argument that YouTube, as a social media application, works against community, see Juhasz 2011; for the opposite position, see Rotman and Preese 2010. 15. See, for instance, "Dan Savage: What the It Gets Better Project Has Accomplished" (2013). 16. For more information on the experience of Sleep No More, consult the essays edited by Matt Kozusko, "Site, Space, and Intimacy: Sleep No More's Immersive Intertext," in Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 7.2 (Winter 2012-Spring 2013). Of particular interest to this discussion is Colette Gordon, "Touching the Spectator: Intimacy, Immersion, and the Theater of the Velvet Rope" (2012-2013). 17. The relation between live and mediated performance is by no means monolithic. See, for instance, Pascale Aebischer's argument that virtual audiences engaged with the Google+ site associated with a 2013 Royal Shakespeare Company performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream were more engaged (and creative) participants than those experiencing the live performance, which in comparison to the individual user's peregrinations through the virtual forest seemed scripted and predictable (Aebsicher 2016). 18. For a good example of a tribute video that I remember as having purloined its images from the now- unavailable New York Times slideshow, see "Sleep No More - Witches 'Rave / Orgy' music" 2011). Some of the images that had been released via news articles, including the New York Times, are now gathered together on the SNM site. The Times also offers images from Sleep No More for sale (see, for instance, "Theatre Sleep 2" 2011).

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Staging Shakespeare in Social Games: Towards a

(/current) Theory of Theatrical Game Design

JENNIFER ROBERTS-SMITH, SHAWN DESOUZA-COELHO, AND TOBY (/previous) MALONE, UNIVERSITY OF WATERLOO

ABSTRACT

This essay discusses the theoretical implications of a recent experiment with game- based social media to increase Shakespeare literacy in eleven to fifteen-year-olds. In collaboration with the Stratford Festival, we aimed to make the gameplay of our pilot, Staging Shakespeare, and the social space it generated, experientially theatrical in some way. While the pilot itself was not, in our view, successful, the design process helped us articulate a theory of theatricality grounded in the ontological complexity of theatrical things and the ontogenetic conditions of theatrical environments. Our conclusion is that literal simulations of Shakespeare's plays or of Shakespearean theater production may not be the richest way to teach Shakespeare through social games. Instead, we may need a design theory grounded in the adaptation of theatrical principles to electronic media, and perhaps a new aesthetic and even a rhetoric of gameplay only associatively related to Shakespeare.

INTRODUCTION Staging Shakespeare (Romeo and Juliet Edition) is the working title of the pilot for the first of a suite of Shakespeare-based games planned by the Gamifying Shakespeare project, a collaborative education-outreach initiative of the Stratford Festival (the largest theatrical institution in Canada), the University of Waterloo Games Institute, and commercial game development companies based in Ontario, Canada (including, for this game, Industry Corp.). One of the goals of the larger project is to increase Shakespeare literacy in eleven to fifteen-year-olds through game-based social media, as a means of continuing the Festival's historical role as a developer www.borrowers.uga.edu/1779/show 1/23 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation of future audiences for its own and other theaters' productions. In particular, Staging Shakespeare aims to communicate a basic understanding of theatricality: that is, that if you speak words or move bodies or objects in different ways on stage, they mean different things. It also showcases the production history and production values of the Festival in the hope of enticing users to translate their online theatrical experiences into live, in-person experiences, thereby generating revenues for the Festival. The project's core methodology is to try to meet potential new young audiences in the mediated social spaces they already occupy, such as games and mainstream social media platforms, circumventing the usual hierarchical avenues of family outings and school field trips to develop a community of young theater enthusiasts who have their own direct and independent relationships with the Festival. Our first task has been to design and produce the working prototype for a cross-platform mobile app called Staging Shakespeare (Romeo and Juliet Edition), which, for reasons we discuss here, we have not yet released.

Staging Shakespeare invites players to engage in a mediated analogue for a community of theater professionals: playing as "directors," they virtually stage excerpts of scenes from Romeo and Juliet (one of the plays that was in production at Stratford in 2013 during the game's initial development phase); playing as "critics," they review one another's virtual productions. (Future "editions" of the app might market the Festival's seasons and expand players' repertoires by replacing text excerpts and production elements related to Romeo and Juliet with assets related to whatever is then playing on stage.) In "director" mode, players move avatars around in three-dimensional models of the Festival's four theaters, using digital renderings of costumes and props held in the Festival's archives and assigning to avatars a limited range of physical gestures. In playback, avatars speak with the pre-recorded voices of Festival actors (see figures 1 through 4).

www.borrowers.uga.edu/1779/show 2/23 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Figure 1. The interface for costuming avatars and moving them through three dimensional models of the Stratford Festival's stages

Figure 2: Two costumes available in the game, based on artifacts in the Stratford Festival's archives. Figures 2a and 2b: a red jacket designed by David Walker and worn by Colm Feore as Romeo in the 1984 Romeo and Juliet in the Festival Theatre, directed by Peter Dews

Figures 2c and 2d: an evening gown worn by Seana McKenna as Juliet in same production

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Figure 3. Two props available in the game, based on artifacts in the Stratford Festival's archives. Figures 3a and 3b: a dagger designed by David Walker and used by Colm Feore as Romeo in the 1984 production directed by Peter Dews

Figures 3c and 3d: a vial used by Seana McKenna as Juliet in the same production

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Figure 4. The interface for assigning gestures to avatars

A "budget meter" determines the resources available in each venue (the gown pictured in figure 2d, for example, is expensive to use). A director's progress through the game is measured by "trophies" earned for scenes staged in each venue (visualized as an emerging pseudo-Elizabethan coat of arms) as well as by a level system that advances players from the smallest through the largest of the Festival's theaters (see figures 5 and 6).

Figure 5. The Festival stages, from smallest to largest. Figure 5a: the Studio Theatre www.borrowers.uga.edu/1779/show 5/23 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation

Figure 5b: the Tom Patterson Theatre

Figure 5c: the Avon Theatre

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Figure 5d: the Festival Theatre

Figure 6. As "directors" stage scenes, the coat of arms is filled in.

In "critic" mode, players view scenes staged by other directors and assign ratings for four pre-defined categories of achievement on a four-star scale. Players interact with one another within fairly tightly circumscribed parameters, since they generate only numerical ratings, and not commentary, on one another's work, a design choice made to reduce the potential for the negative exchanges so www.borrowers.uga.edu/1779/show 7/23 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation common in unmediated online forums. Instead, depending on the rating assigned, the game automatically publishes a two-part, pre-programmed review statement for each category of achievement, each part having its own potential for pedagogical application. (The first part begins "Shakespeare says . . ." and follows with a tongue-in-cheek adaptation of a quotation from Shakespeare; the second part begins "Critics say . . ." and offers an explanatory statement in modern English). The game then averages and publishes the four category ratings along with another two-part summarizing statement; see figure 7.)

Figure 7. "Critics" award star-ratings in four categories of achievement; Category four ("Faithfulness") was the subject of considerable debate.

Directors' coat of arms screens display their reviews, but the reviews (good or bad) do not affect directors' progress through the game: good reviews lead to bigger budgets in future "productions," but bad reviews do not prevent directors from staging more scenes. Directors can share their reviews on Facebook if they want to advertise their successes, but once on Facebook, reviews operate principally as publicity for the game (and by extension the Festival), since further interactions are limited to Facebook likes and comments. Staged scenes themselves are stored on the Festival's servers, and access to them is available only by downloading the Staging Shakespeare app. Although other social media platforms may be engaged in future "editions" of this or other games, Facebook seemed a reasonable starting place, given the age range of the target demographic for this first prototype. In this iteration of Staging Shakespeare, there is no direct path from the game back to the live theater, but the development team has considered a juried competition to which virtual directors could submit sets of virtual scenes and virtual critics could submit short original prose reviews of them; winners would receive tickets to Romeo and Juliet or whatever play was featured in the game during the season of that particular edition's release. www.borrowers.uga.edu/1779/show 8/23 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation As perhaps is to be expected in a collaborative digital tool-development project, the process of designing Staging Shakespeare has raised strategic, logistical, aesthetic, rhetorical, and ethical questions enough to occupy more papers than we will ever have time to write. They include, for example: will we sell more tickets by showcasing the Festival directly in this medium, or by just trying to make something cool that will make the Festival seem attractive by association? How will we track sales resulting from gameplay? How do we render the Festival's high material production values in low-resolution images suitable for mobile devices? What should we call things? ("Edition"? "Production"? "Actor"? "Avatar"? "User"? "Player"?) How should we group and sequence gameplay activities? (Set and costumes together? Set and light? Avatar selection followed by costume design or vice-versa? Should you have to direct and critique? Direct, then critique?) How should we represent the Festival's policy of "non-traditional" casting? (Should it be optional for teenagers or imposed by programming? Does it require an explicit, dedicated pedagogical frame?) Is it acceptable to get kids to pressure their parents to buy tickets (in the unlikely event that we should be so successful)? These and other questions have generated extended discussion and have significantly influenced the design of our evolving prototype of Staging Shakespeare; their cumulative effect has been to return us again and again to the core pedagogical question of why we are doing this in the first place. What is the nature of the social space that we hope this game will create? To design a game is, after all, to design an experience; what are we asking our players — who will be perhaps only eleven years old and probabky not older than fifteen — to do together in the particular social medium of our game, and what do those activities argue and teach about our knowledge and values as they relate to theater?

If the focus of our pedagogy in Staging Shakespeare is theatricality, its gameplay — and the social space its gameplay generates — need to be in some way experientially theatrical. The concept of theatricality has, of course, been used to describe various aspects of human-computer interaction since very early on, most visibly perhaps by Brenda Laurel's 1991 Computers as Theatre. Many complex games continue to use strategies to engage players that we might think of as analogous to aspects of the theater. The role-playing relationship between player and avatar is the most obvious and ubiquitous example in its analogy to acting. Less common but arguably as theatrical is the analogy to an audience's (rather than an actor's) identification with character in games such as Heavy Rain (2010) or Journey (2012), where players become affectively invested in non-playable characters with which they can only interact through the "hero" characters they control. The live theater has also been represented explicitly in a range of games and interactive simulations, such as Façade's "one-act interactive drama" (Stern and Mateas 2005) and the Simulated Environment for Theatre (SET) (Roberts-Smith et al. 2012; 2013).

Perhaps the most extensive and long-lived simulations of theater in social media have occurred in Second Life, which at one time hosted a number of troupes of performing avatars, including the Second Life Shakespeare Company. Virtual adaptations of Shakespeare have been as numerous there as virtual productions. As Katherine Rowe has observed, the "persistent," "extensible," customizable environment of Second Life is particularly conducive to "creative, public engagement with Shakespeare online" (2010, 59). It has been used as a www.borrowers.uga.edu/1779/show 9/23 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation pedagogical tool for theater studies and even as a means of disseminating the findings of major academic theater research projects, such as King's Visualization Lab's Theatron3 (2009)at King's College London. The project's reconstructions of lost European theaters occupied Second Life real estate and hosted visiting avatars for several years.

Lastly, theater artists have reciprocally adopted, co-opted, and adapted social media and game structures as means of analogizing digital environments and generating augmented realities: I Love Bees, Nine Inch Nails' Year Zero (2007), and Improv Everywhere's repertoire (2013) are a few examples. Nonetheless, despite the prolific exchange of analogies among digital and theatrical environments, we have not yet encountered any extended attempt to create or critique digital experiences that aim to analogize theatricality from an experiential perspective; that is, we know of no digital environments that intentionally generate what we would describe as theatrical experiences, nor of any criticism that aims to articulate how a digital theatrical experience — in the way we conceive it, as a social experience — might be accomplished.

Our purpose here, then, is in part to reflect on the pilot digital game we have developed (and in particular on its limitations, since we have decided not to release the game in its current iteration), but also to begin addressing what we can only in all frankness describe as the theoretical vacuum at the core of our design process. We begin with an attempt to define our key concepts — virtuality, theatricality, and the social imaginary — in relation to one another and in a way that helps us to apply them across the media of live theater, digital games, and other aesthetic representations of human experience. We then look to existing digital games for models of the kinds of experiences we hope to generate. We conclude with some speculation about potential approaches to designing social games that facilitate theatrical interactions.

VIRTUALITY, THEATRICALITY, AND THE SOCIAL IMAGINARY Although we are conscious that the term "real" and its complement "imaginary" belong in particular ways to the trajectory of discourse reaching from Lacan to Žižek,1 we are nonetheless going to co-opt them here for different purposes. Their more familiar vernacular usages are convenient starting places for our argument. "Real" for the purposes of this discussion is a means of packaging the dimensional, temporal, material experiences of our everyday lives, which we encounter with our physical senses — external, embodied reality, if you will — along with the immaterial, conceptual, perceptual, or affective experiences of our intellectual and emotional senses — internal reality, if you will — and setting those two experiences against the virtual, which is a representation of one or the other kind of reality or both, whether fantastical or faithful, usually manifest in or on some kind of non-human material object, like a piece of stone or a book or a computer, but sometimes in or on a human object, as in the case of a tattoo or a theatrical performance. In this conception of reality and virtuality, a sculpture might be a virtual world, and so might the printed words in a novel, or the image in a tattoo, or the gestures in a play, just as fully as the code driving Second Life is. The virtual is a representation of human experience expressed through some www.borrowers.uga.edu/1779/show 10/23 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation material medium (e.g., paint, canvas, paper, skin, ink, muscle, voice, metal, plastic, electrons). Any version of the virtual generates a fourth kind of experience (after the material real, the immaterial real, and the virtual): an imaginary — call it fiction, perhaps. We touch, we read, we view, we play, knowing that our imaginative occupation of the virtual worlds we are touching, reading, viewing, or playing is intentional and not real, just as we willingly and actively choose to suspend disbelief when we are auditors of a theatrical performance. The imaginary is intentionally generated by an audience in response to the virtual; it is neither materially nor immaterially real. When an audience that is made up of more persons than one respond together intentionally to the shared experience of a particular virtuality, they might be said to generate together a social imaginary. To the extent that our Staging Shakespeare game occupies electronic social media, it does so in the hope that those spaces can accommodate the kind of social imaginary that is peculiar to the theater.

One of the things that distinguishes theater from other prompts to the generation of the imaginary (other virtualities) is that the theater's representations are created not by inscription, but by instrumentalization. The theater does not record representations on objects for future encounters; instead, it makes representations by using objects (including the bodies and voices of performers) for short periods of time in unusual, unexpected, or contextually incongruous ways. Theatrical virtuality is an activity rather than a thing; the theatrical imaginary is not something we can generate individually by interacting with an inscribed object (touching, looking, reading, turning pages, pressing buttons), but something we do communally by performing and/or witnessing (and contextualizing and interpreting) unusual instrumentalization. W. B. Worthen (2010) has recently described the theater's mode of expressiveness as technological: whereas a tool is designed for a specific purpose, a technology can be co-opted in a variety of social contexts for unexpected purposes. His example is a screwdriver, which can be used as a tool to insert or remove screws, but could equally be used technologically as a toothpick or a murder weapon or a stake for supporting tomatoes without losing its intended functionality as a screwdriver (2010, 21-22). We see the screwdriver's unexpected use as multiplying its ontologies, not only by addition but also by juxtaposition: the space between screwdriver and tomato stake might expand, for example, into a third ontology of metaphorical critique of the relationship between Nature and Manufacture. Because it never loses a function once that function has been established, adding functions to it sequentially (as the theater often does with its material resources — kill a vampire with it next, then pick tomato skins out of our teeth with it, still bloody and steaming) amounts to adding functions and juxtapositions simultaneously; in technological use, a theatrical entity's ontologies multiply exponentially.

In his commentary, Worthen is talking about theatrical text, of course, but his example of the screwdriver invites the extension we make to any material element that is manipulated in a theatrical production (including light, sound, and human bodies as well as inanimate objects), each of which remains really itself and also enables, through unusual manipulations, the simultaneous imaginative perception(s) of some thing(s) else. The technological nature of theatrical things makes them different from other entities that we might normally classify as media www.borrowers.uga.edu/1779/show 11/23 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation of virtuality. Some other media do generate imaginaries through interaction between their material-real functions and their virtual inscriptions. George Herbert's The Temple is an old example of a book of this kind: if I flap the opening at which his "Easter Wings" is printed, I see his wing-shaped text "fly." Jonathan Safran Foer's Tree of Codes is a recent example: if I turn its cut-out pages in sequence, I perceive its textual "codes" "branching" through its empty spaces. But while both of these works function simultaneously and generatively as material books and also as sites of inscription of the virtual, access to their inscribed virtuality still depends upon my using them in the ways in which they were intended to be used. If I do not flap the opening in The Temple at which Herbert's "Easter Wings" is printed, I will not see his text "fly"; if I do not turn the cut-out pages of Foer's adapted novel, I will not perceive its branching codes. Similarly, if I use them in unintended ways, they will lose their intended functions: if I eat my lunch off them, for example, I won't be able to read them any more; just as if I eat my lunch off my iPad, I will not be able to play Staging Shakespeare on it; or at least — assuming it survives my tuna sandwich — not at the same time. If the inscriptions of these works (The Temple, Tree of Codes, Staging Shakespeare) or their sites (books, iPad) are used in unintended ways, their virtualities are obscured, and consequently their ontologies are diminished rather than multiplied. Because their virtualities are inscribed rather than functional, they are not technological: inscriptions cannot be used unconventionally without losing their virtuality. Material sites of inscription of virtuality — tools for housing virtuality — are not by their nature technologies in Worthen's sense; only instrumental, active, functional modes of expressing virtuality — things in simultaneous use as themselves and as something else — are theatrical modes of virtuality. The theater's virtuality juxtaposes multiple disparate but simultaneous functional realities and (consequently) generates multiple simultaneous imaginaries; the experience of the theater is the experience of multiple, simultaneous, emerging perspectives on human experience.

To extend this principle to the social imaginary: because theatrical imaginaries are traditionally experienced by groups of people in shared spaces, visible and audible to one another, for prescribed periods of time, the participants in its social imaginaries become themselves evolving instruments of the imaginaries as they emerge. Individual audience members are as fully themselves and something else as are performers in this context: reacting or responding to the new experience of a play, I am changed, I see others change, the change in them in turn changes my understanding of them and of the play, performers respond to the changes in us as the performance proceeds, and so on. In this process, the distinction between user and instrument breaks down: theatrical virtualities are generated only by participants and not by things; the relationship between creator and receiver is not essentially mediated by materials; indeed (in its most extreme theoretical expression), the distinction between creator and audience in the theater is moot. Brian Massumi's useful term for this emergent social mode of being is "ontogenesis," by extension of "ontology" as a word (2002, 8); he conceives of ontogenesis as an open-ended sociality, "a sociality without borders," "ontogenetically 'prior to' . . . the very distinction between the individual and the collective, as well as any given model of their interaction" (2002, 9). Indeed, Massumi says, "that interaction is precisely what takes form" (2002, 9). In the www.borrowers.uga.edu/1779/show 12/23 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation emergent social imaginary of the theater, there are no objects and no observers, because everyone is an agent of ontogenetic interaction.

THEATRICAL SIMULATION: GAMEPLAY, GAME WORLDS, AND SOCIAL GAMING If the experience of the theater is the experience of intentionally generating multiple simultaneous social imaginaries in response to the technological actions of human agents, you cannot do it on a mobile device. So in what way can an app for a mobile device communicate theatricality? Can we inscribe (since that is what a mobile device can do) even the illusion of a theatrical experience in a game at all? At various stages in the development of Staging Shakespeare, we considered and rejected existing models of game-apps, however successful, on the grounds that they more often created the antithesis of a theatrical experience for their users than a theatrical one. The models included games of chance (we experimented with a slot-machine allotment of set and costume pieces that resulted in wonderfully productive incongruities of time, place, and style); games requiring repetitive, expert manipulation of a limited set of controls (in a nod to our then- current, for academics, addictions to Temple Run (2011), we tried an applause meter that counted the number of roses vs. tomatoes that a user could "toss" at the stage in a limited time, changing the angle of a slingshot to hit different character avatars); games requiring or teaching a specific, measurable knowledge set (we discussed a pre-programmed "rating" system that would allow the game to assess automatically the quality of a player's simulated production). Entertaining as they were, and (as our commercial development partner, Industry Corp., advised us) as likely to increase the appeal of the game for eleven to fourteen-year-olds, each of these models taught players to learn and operate a narrow set of functions within a closed system. As their expertise developed, players developed a clearer picture of the singularity and limitations of that system's organization. The games were tools (in Worthen's terms) rather than technologies; the ontologies of their gameworlds were circumscribed rather than generative; and the distinctions among creators, audiences, and tools were reinforced rather than broken down. With that last point in mind, we have also seriously reconsidered the forms of "social" interaction that our prototype design encourages: these are principally modes of advertising (self-promotion of players sharing their reviews and the indirect advertising that sharing provides to the Festival); anonymous, reductive forms of valuation (Facebook "likes" and numerical ratings out of four); and competition (an inevitable outcome of review-sharing, even if our proposed formal, adjudicated competition were never run). In short: objects, observers, and ontologies abound in this design, but agents and ontogeneses are conspicuously absent. On the other hand, we did find some more promising avenues for experimentation in the design of larger-scale, more complex games than mobile apps typically offer. (As a consequence, one of the persistent remaining questions for us is whether we should be working in mobile media at all.) These fall loosely into three categories of what we might call simulation that seem potentially able to communicate illusions of theatricality. The categories are simulation in gameplay, simulation in game worlds, and social gaming.

www.borrowers.uga.edu/1779/show 13/23 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation By simulation in gameplay, what we mean is that the activities available to a player are parallel to the activities available to a theater-creator; in other words, things in the game-world can be used for purposes that were not necessarily foreseen by the game's creators. The term used in game studies for this kind of gameplay is "emergence," since it emerges from the interactions of players with a fairly simple set of rules; emergent gameplay is an exploration of a game-world that is proportionally more open-ended and complex than are the rules that guide it (see Juul 2005). Chess is the classic example of an emergent game; among digital games, Starcraft (1998) multiplayer is a real time strategy example; Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (2011) multiplayer is a first-person shooter example. Staging Shakespeare adopts an emergent design strategy to the extent that it permits players to select among and combine a variety of production elements in ways that allow them to express personal interpretations of scenes from Shakespeare's plays. Set pieces and props can be moved around on stage, avatars can be costumed, while blocking, lighting, and sound cues can be changed, text can be cut, and everything "rehearsed" can be played back in sequential "performance"; there is no knowing in advance what choices any individual player will make or what meaning will be generated by them. There are, however, significant limitations to the inventory of options available to players. One consequence of making voice recordings of texts available, for example, is that although players can cut the texts being staged, they cannot change them (we cannot provide new voice recordings by Stratford Festival actors of every new version of a text drafted by players). Another consequence is that vocal execution of the text can be manipulated only in the very limited sense that players can choose from four different voices for their avatars (male/female, older/younger); the four deliveries themselves are fixed. Because the world of our game is limited by the number of choices available to players, it is not experientially theatrical; nor is the world of even the most complex, large-scale, multiplayer strategy game; because it operates in closed systems, emergent gameplay is not theatrical. But to the extent that players do not exhaust the options available to them in a gameworld, emergent gameplay creates the illusion of an open system; the more complex the gameworld, the better the illusion. Theatrical experiences exist in open systems, even if only a very limited number of their infinite possibilities are actually used; emergent gameplay exists in closed systems, but creates the illusion of an open system by making available a very large number of possibilities.

The second promising form of simulation — simulation in gameworlds — occurs in games whose virtualities simulate multiple levels of reality; these games arguably parallel the experiences of theater audiences. Assassin's Creed II (2009) for example, analogizes the co-presence of the material reality of the theater and the fictional reality of the play-world by offering levels of virtual reality, at a temporal and geographical distance from one another, that can be perceived simultaneously inside the game-world. Its players encounter its principal playing arena of Renaissance Italy by means of a fictional machine called the Animus, which taps into the protagonist Desmond Miles's "genetic memory" to allow users to play as Desmond, controlling the actions of the Renaissance ancestors who appear in his genetic past. Desmond's continued present existence is perceptible to the user and to the character of Desmond during gameplay, but not to the characters of Desmond's ancestors. In the much humbler game world of Staging Shakespeare, we www.borrowers.uga.edu/1779/show 14/23 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation have attempted to contrast, among simulations of the "reality" of the theater, the "virtuality" of an individual performance and the "imaginary" of the audience's experience. Our "real" objects are explicit representations of the externally-real Stratford Festival: its repertoire, its venues, its archives, and its acting company. Spaces are navigable; objects and avatars are three-dimensional, articulated, and movable; staged text is manifested as sound rather than type. (A key design victory, we thought, was the decision not to put un-costumed avatars in tights; they are, instead, in yoga pants and sweats, the way real Festival actors tend to be, backstage before they are costumed.) Players manipulate the simulated "real" to create the simulated "virtual," and in "critic" mode, responses to the simulated "imaginary" are expressed. Both our Stratford Festival and Assassin's Creed II's Animus/Italy incorporate into their virtual worlds differing perspectives on human experience (director/critic; Desmond/his ancestors); but both game worlds remain, nonetheless, hermetically virtual worlds that do not interact with actual reality. In this sense, they may be meta-virtual, offering complex virtualities that invite the contemplation of multiple perspectives; but they cannot be theatrical, juxtaposing contrasting virtualities to create the experience of multiple perspectives. Theatrical experiences multiply ontologies; meta-virtualities create the illusion of multiple ontologies by offering multiple in-world perspectives.

The third promising form of simulation — simulation in social gaming — occurs in games that incentivize collaborative social interactions as means of advancing through the games themselves. The most straightforward strategy is simple content-sharing, as in Angry Birds: Epic (2014), which allows players to use friends' stores to power up; or Geometry Dash (Topala 2013), which facilitates the movement of gameplay assets (such as avatars' costumes) among players by unlocking them with Facebook "likes." More sophisticated social content sharing permits the development and sharing of levels of gameplay for others to play (in, for example, Little Big Planet 3 (2011) or ModNation Racers (2012), a design strategy that extends the principles of emergent gameplay to the configuration of the game-world. In that sense, it perhaps provides an analogue for an open-ended system that is social in the theatrical sense of emphasizing the agency of participants (in this case, level designers), although that agency remains individual and depends upon a creator-audience dichotomy. In even more sophisticated social designs, player collaborations are an essential condition for advancement through a game (Spaceteam [Smith 2012] is an example), and even of the development of the game itself. In a well-documented example, Valve Corporation's Team Fortress 2 (2007) extends the collaborative principle to crowd- sourced modifications of the game solicited and delivered by means of Steam, the distribution and social media network developed by Valve to serve its community of players (see Moore 2011); more recently, the Playstation Network has served the same function for Journey (2012). While this design strategy does not endow players with the unlimited agency required for ontogenetic interactions in Massumi's terms (since Valve and Sony ultimately retain control of the selection and distribution of modifications to their games), it does characterize players as making meaningful individual and collaborative (if only because curated) contributions to the virtuality of a game; in that sense, the imaginaries generated by the games could be said to be analogous to the collaboratively-generated social imaginaries of the theater. Theatrical interactions are ontogenetic; incentivized www.borrowers.uga.edu/1779/show 15/23 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation social collaborations create the illusion of ontogenesis by curating combinations of individual ontological contributions.

Although the Staging Shakespeare design team sees a variety of potential applications of social content-sharing to our existing prototype, the potential affordances of required collaboration and even required collaborative game design seem more germane at this stage to the pedagogical goals of our project. The examples of, Team Fortress 2 (2007) and Journey (2012), in particular,have also extended our working concept of a "social network." That concept now seems to us, on the one hand, less tied to existing public platforms and more available for shaping and definition according to the needs of our project and our constituency of players — and, on the other hand, even if tied to existing platforms, less desirably dependent upon our control. In practical terms, we are now seeking to enable (rather than limit) the agency of our young players in social media spaces. At a minimum, this means that preventing them from commenting on one other's scenes is not acceptable; more ambitiously, we are pursuing a new staging game that requires local (social, but independent of mainstream social media platforms) collaboration among a group of players to stage a production; we are working towards collaborative Twitter performances, improvised by young people on the basis of their reading of Shakespeare, and un-edited by teachers or Festival staff, in advance of their attendance at Festival productions. A third idea in circulation is a Shakespeare game design camp, during which young people might design and exchange their own theatrical games.

SIMULATING ONTOLOGICAL MULTIPLICATION: INTERPLAY Although we like to think of our immediate plans for new games and game- related pedagogical activities as elegant recoveries from the design failures of Staging Shakespeare, we are also conscious that the most useful outcome of our process so far may be the question of whether literal references to Shakespeare or analogies to the theater need necessarily remain core principles of our designs. There are examples of games entirely unrelated to the theater that arguably simulate the ontological multiplication at the core of theatrical experience better than self-consciously "theatrical" games can. Since this is the most recent and least well-developed part of our design process, it is not yet clear to us how these approaches to game design might be employed in the design of social experiences that characterize players as agents. Nonetheless, we offer the observations that follow here as a gesture in the direction of a new design philosophy that will inform the project's future work.

A shared limitation to theatrical simulation in both gameplay and game worlds is the limitation imposed by digital inscription upon the means of interaction between real player and virtual game. Because digital devices can only respond in the ways they have been programmed to respond to commands issued through their controllers, their virtualities remain hermetic and artificial. The theater multiplies the ontologies of the real by means of functional virtualities; digital media multiply the virtual by means of inscription but do not interact with the real. To our minds, the most effective kind of illusion of theatrical experience would be the illusion of an ontological shift in the real, generated by an interaction www.borrowers.uga.edu/1779/show 16/23 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation between game and player(s). Since the only real element in a digital game with an ontology that can be shifted is its player (the device is a tool; the game is an inscription; only the player has flexibility and, perhaps ironically, agency, since the player can accept the limitations of tool and inscription in order to play), the theatrical illusion in gameplay must be manifest in a shift in the player's sense of herself (or themselves). Staging Shakespeare emphatically does not accomplish this (nor do the games we cite above as enabling social agency in their players). For all our well-intentioned pedagogy, it would be entirely fair to say that no player is likely to emerge from our gameplay thinking "something just happened to me." Some games, however, do generate that experience, we think by means of an interplay between gameplay and game world.

At this point, we want to distinguish games that create the illusion of ontological multiplication from games that encourage players to adopt multiple roles, identities, or perspectives. Unlike in the theater, where the roles of actor and audience are (except in very unusual cases) clearly delineated, games frequently offer players multiple options for engagement as audience, actor, and even character. The act of physically engaging with the game's controller makes the player a player in the game world; his agency in the manipulation of an avatar makes the avatar his character and makes him an actor in the theatrical sense; and her witness of the world and its narrative make her the game's audience as well. When, for example, in Heavy Rain (2010), a player takes on the role of the game's protagonist Ethan Mars and, in a truly horrific scene, is asked to cut his own finger off, he is placed in the disturbing position of being at once the player-as- agent of that cutting (the player-as-player, as holding a controller), the player-as- cutter (the player-as-actor, playing Ethan), and the player-as-witness to the cutting (audience to Ethan-as-Ethan, as a character existing within a temporal-spatiality apart from that of the player). Complex as the simultaneous occupation of these roles may be — and arguably more complex than any individual is able to experience in the theater — multiple role-playing is not in itself theatrical. Even Staging Shakespeare offers multiple role-playing in the opportunity for players to play as directors and as critics (albeit sequentially); but since the roles in Staging Shakespeare and other games are predetermined and fixed by the games' inscriptions, they remain hermetic to the games' virtualities. Role multiplication, on the other hand — especially if it is unpredictable, especially if it generates a new imaginary, and especially if it is socially prompted among collaborative game- players — might create the illusion of theatricality.

Two games stand out as examples of the kind of gameplay experience that we might describe as creating an illusion of ontological multiplication; neither of the illusions is socially prompted, but both suggest to us that it would be worth pursuing the application of their design principles as elements of social theatrical games. The first example is The Last of Us (2013), an action-adventure game developed by Naughty Dog, which follows protagonists Joel and Ellie as they travel together across the United States of America in search of a cure for the infection that has wiped out most of civilization. Over the course of the game, there are numerous moments in which the player-as-Joel encounters an environmental puzzle common in third-person cooperative (distinct, in our terms, from collaborative) adventure games, namely, a platform too high to pass alone. www.borrowers.uga.edu/1779/show 17/23 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Whenever Joel reaches such a platform, a trigger pops up on the screen and, when the player presses the designated button, Joel braces against the wall with his hands on his knee, vaulting Ellie up to the platform. Ellie then either struggles to pull Joel up or finds some alternative method of helping him (a ladder, for example). Late in the game, shortly after a particularly climactic sequence in which Ellie brutally murders a man who is attempting to strangle her to death, the player-as-Joel reaches a platform too high and presses the on-screen trigger, but nothing happens. Joel braces against the wall, hands on his knee, expecting Ellie to come, but she doesn't. Instead, Joel stands upright as the camera rotates toward Ellie, sitting on a bench, clearly distraught. Joel then calls out to her, reminding her tenderly, "Ellie. The ladder, c'mon." The difference between this iteration of the environmental puzzle and the set of conventional iterations that have preceded it represents an attempt on Naughty Dog's part to alter the position of the virtuality of the game world in relation to the material reality of the player's manipulation of the game's controller. It is an unexpected change for the player (albeit a pre-programmed change) in the functionality of the game device, and the disruption it creates in gameplay parallels a disruption in the narrative of the game, drawing attention to an important turning point in the relationship between its protagonists. The user's role as player — her relationship to the game — shifts in that moment in two ways: she is both a more intimate participant in the game world (perceiving an increased intimacy between its protagonists) and also a less powerful agent in the world (since the relationship has advanced as a result of her inability to effect its usual development, growing in spite of her rather than because of her for the first time). She has become not just player, but voyeur. This shift in positionality cannot be described as active on the player's part; but we can imagine a version of this design principle that might be dependent upon players rather than pre-programmed functionalities: if, for example, Ellie were "played" by another player, and if players could affect the affordances that the game offered to other players, players might multiply one another's roles in the game world.

The second, more complex example achieves its illusion of ontological multiplication by means of a similar unexpected functionality in the game's controller. Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons (2013), developed by Starbreeze Studios, follows two brothers as they venture out into the world to find a cure for their father's mysterious sickness. During the game, the player controls both brothers simultaneously using half the controller for each brother. The player-as-brothers solves puzzles to progress through the game, including the same platform puzzle as appears in The Last of Us (in this case, the younger brother is vaulted by the older brother). Unlike in The Last of Us, however, in this game's climactic battle (between the brothers and a woman-as-generically-predictable-siren), one of its protagonists, the older brother, dies. At this point, the player expects the half of the game's controller that has been used to manipulate the older brother to lose its functionality, but it does not. On the contrary, in a gesture opposite from the shift made in The Last of Us (continued functionality rather than disrupted functionality), the controller remains active to the point that, when the player-as- younger-brother once more encounters the persistent platform puzzle, the player must use the older brother's half of the controller in order to pass it. In combination, these shifts in the game play and the game world of Brothers: A Tale www.borrowers.uga.edu/1779/show 18/23 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation of Two Sons — continued control functionality without a visible controlled entity, the death of a central character in the game's narrative, the ironic continued necessity of the dead character's agency in order to advance game play — effectively change the real player's positionality in relation to the virtual world of the game. His role of player-as-player is disrupted by the unexpected behavior of the controller; his role of player-as-actor is changed from player-as-acting-two- characters to player-as-acting-one-character (increasing his identification with the single remaining character); and his perspective as player-as-witness to the game world is changed because the rules of the world have shifted from emphasis on the operations of external, material reality (it takes two brothers in co-operation to cross a high platform) to emphasis on, perhaps, internal spirituality (it takes me and the knowledge of how my brother helped me to cross a high platform).

In Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, the contrast between the player's positionality before and after the narrative moment of the death of the older brother is exaggerated by the surprise of the continued functionality of the older brother's side of the controller; and both sides of the contrast (before and after) are also kept simultaneously alive by the continuing functionality of the controller to do things the now absent brother avatar used to do, a continuing reminder of his earlier presence. This is a simultaneous juxtaposition of positionalities rather than ontologies, but it nonetheless generates one of the outcomes of a theatrical juxtaposition, in the sense that in the space between the player's before and after positions, a third positionality opens up, in which the player is invited to make an interpretation. Our experience of playing Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons is that before the older brother's death, it was a quest, arguing through narrative that finding things matters; after, it was a relationship, illustrating through affect that people matter. The contrast between those two perspectives on human experience was a commentary upon our ironic misplacement of priorities. In the unexpected interplay between game play and the game world, we as players felt that something had happened to us. Beyond role multiplication, whether pre-programmed or (in our imagined game environments) prompted by other characters, the design of Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons also suggests to us that the core element of what we want to call theatrical game design might simply be a system that rewards the subversion of players' expectations by other players. Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons creates the illusion of an open system in the meaningful surprise it offers its players; could we design a game that incentivizes meaningful surprise? In a multiplayer game, how might those incentives be collaborative rather than cooperative or competitive?

CODA: STAGING SHAKESPEARE IN SOCIAL MEDIA? If the existing prototype of Staging Shakespeare can make any claim to engaging reality, it does so in its engagement of existing social media platforms, in which, it might be argued, real players engage one another in a limited way. When we were developing the game, we saw the functions of sharing and reviewing virtual productions of scenes as simulations of the communal exchanges among theater creators and theater audiences, and ways of breaking the hermetic seal of the virtual world we had inscribed. In retrospect, however, reflecting upon the illusions generated by what we have been calling the "interplay" between the www.borrowers.uga.edu/1779/show 19/23 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation systems and the fictions of games — between gameplay and game worlds — we no longer think of existing social media platforms as necessarily the most promising media for generating the illusion of theatrical experience. Interactions on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Instagram are certainly performative (insofar as they enable public, constructed self-representations) and interactive (because performers can exchange representations, alter one another's representations, even collaboratively author representations); but they are not theatrical because they so narrowly limit the virtual worlds they inscribe. At their richest, social media experiences might be analogous to emergent gameplay; at their least rich, they are as deterministic and ethically questionable (at least from the point of view of theater pedagogy) as the simplest "push-a-button-repeatedly" apps.

In hindsight, we would like to suggest, very tentatively, that an understanding of theatricality that is grounded in Worthen's theory of the technological nature of theatrical things and Massumi's theory of ontogenesis might be a useful way to approach social pedagogical game design, in Shakespeare studies in particular and in theater studies more broadly. Our own experience as game designers and game players leads us to the conclusion — and this will not be at all surprising to Shakespeare scholars — that literal simulations either of Shakespeare's plays or of Shakespearean theater production may not be the richest ways to teach about why Shakespeare matters at all. Instead, we may need a design theory grounded in the adaptation of theatrical principles to electronic media, perhaps a new aesthetic and even a rhetoric of interplay only associatively related to Shakespeare, of the kind we see emerging in games such as The Last of Us and Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, in order to offer the next generation of our students an experience rich enough to represent our values. If the theater matters pedagogically, it matters because of the peculiar forms of ontological and ontogenetic richness that theatrical experiences offer (by contrast to their much more often recognized and, in our view, less important affectivity); because theatrical experiences have embedded in their ontologies more than one perspective upon their identities; and because creators and audiences alike are agents of those emergent perspectives. Those things seem more likely to manifest in the frame of a new, aesthetically and theoretically informed approach game design than in our first attempt — however well- intentioned — to wrestle Shakespeare into the limited conceptions of gaming and social media with which we had begun.

CREDITS AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Game development: Concept: Jennifer Roberts-Smith and Andrew Matlock. Design, text, artwork, and programming: for Waterloo: Jennifer Roberts-Smith, Shawn DeSouza- Coelho, Toby Malone, and Neil Randall; for Industry Corp.: Andrew Matlock and Rani Lian; for the Stratford Festival: Anita Gaffney. Avatar voices: direction: Dean Gabourie; performance: Shauna Black, Ian Lake, Tyrone Savage, Abigail Winter-Culliford, and Jonny Woolley. Research assistance: Shawn DeSouza-Coelho. Thanks also to Andrea Gammon, Director of Education, Stratford Festival; Francesca Marini, Former Director, Stratford Festival Archives; Stan Ruecker, Associate Professor, Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology; John www.borrowers.uga.edu/1779/show 20/23 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Tiggeloven, Director of Production, Stratford Festival; Michael Walton, Lighting Design, Stratford Festival.

This research has been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Stratford Festival, and Mitacs.

NOTES 1. For relatively concise explanations of the ways in which Lacan and Žižek employ these terms, we recommend Žižek 2008, 190-94 and Žižek 2007, 145-46.

REFERENCES Angry Birds: Epic. 2014. Chimera Entertainment. Munich: Rovio Entertainment. Assassin's Creed II. 2009. Ubisoft Montreal. Montreal: Ubisoft Montreal. Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons. 2013. Starbreeze Studios. Stockholm: 505 Games. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. 2011. Infinity Ward and Sledgehammer Games. Woodland Hills: Activision Publishing. Foer, Jonathan Safran. 2011. Tree of Codes. London: Visual Editions. Heavy Rain. 2010. Quantic Dream. Foster City: Sony Computer Entertainment America. I Love Bees. 2004. 42 Entertainment. Redmond: Microsoft Game Studios. Available online: http://ilovebees.com (http://ilovebees.com) [accessed 22 February 2013]. Improv Everywhere. 2013. "Improv Everywhere: We Cause Scenes." Improv Everywhere. Available online: http://improveverywhere.com/ (http://improveverywhere.com/) [accessed 22 February 2013]. Journey. 2012. Thatgamecompany. Los Angeles: Sony Computer Entertainment. Juul, Jesper. 2005. Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds. Cambridge: MIT Press. King's Visualization Lab. 2009. Theatron3. King's Visualization Lab, King's College London. http://cms.cch.kcl.ac.uk/theatron/ (http://cms.cch.kcl.ac.uk/theatron/) [accessed 10 February 2012]. The Last of Us. 2013. Naughty Dog. Santa Monica: Sony Computer Entertainment. Laurel, Brenda. 1991. Computers as Theatre. Reading: Addison-Wesley. Little Big Planet 3. 2014. Sumo Digital. Sheffield: Sony Computer Entertainment. Massumi, Brian. 2002. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham: Duke University Press.

www.borrowers.uga.edu/1779/show 21/23 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Media Molecule Blog. 2013. Media Molecule. Available online: http://www.mediamolecule.com/blog (http://www.mediamolecule.com/blog) [accessed 30 March 2016]. ModNation Racers. 2010. United Front Games. Vancouver: Sony Computer Entertainment. Moore, Christopher. 2011. "Hats of Affect: A Study of Affect, Achievements and Hats in Team Fortress 2." Game Studies 11.1: 1-14. Roberts-Smith, Jennifer, Shawn DeSouza-Coelho, Teresa M. Dobson, Sandra Gabriele, Omar Rodriguez-Arenas, Stan Ruecker, Stéfan Sinclair, Annmarie Akong, Matt Bouchard, Marcelo Hong, Diane Jakacki, David Lam, Alexandra Kovacs, Lesley Northam, and Daniel So. 2013. "Visualizing Theatrical Text: From Watching the Script to the Simulated Environment for Theatre (SET)." Digital Humanities Quarterly 7.3. Roberts-Smith, Jennifer, Shawn DeSouza-Coelho, Teresa M. Dobson, Sandra Gabriele, Omar Rodriguez-Arenas, Stan Ruecker, and Stéfan Sinclair. 2012. Simulated Environment for Theatre. Version 2. Available online: http://humviz.org/set (http://humviz.org/set) [accessed 29 March 2016]. Rowe, Katherine. 2010. "Crowd-sourcing Shakespeare: Screen Work and Screen Play in Second Life." Shakespeare Studies 38: 58-67. Second Life. 2003. San Francisco: Linden Lab. "The SL Shakespeare Company." 2007-2008. Available online: http://slshakespeare.com/ (http://slshakespeare.com/) [accessed 14 May 2014]. Smith, Henry. 2012. Spaceteam. Available online: http://www.sleepingbeastgames.com/spaceteam/ (http://www.sleepingbeastgames.com/spaceteam/) [accessed 2 April 2016]. Starcraft. 1998. Blizzard Entertainment. Irvine: Blizzard Entertainment. Stern, A., and M. Mateas. 2005. Façade. Available online: http://www.interactivestory.net/ (http://www.interactivestory.net/) [accessed 11 January 2011]. Team Fortress 2. 2007. Valve Corporation. Bellevue: Valve Corporation and Electronic Arts. Temple Run. 2011. Imangi Studios. Raleigh: Imangi Studios. Topala, Robert. 2013. Geometry Dash. Sweden: RobTop Games. Worthen, William. 2010. Drama: Between Poetry and Performance. Malden: Wiley- Blackwell. Year Zero. 2007. 42 Entertainment. Burbank: 42 Entertainment. Available online: http://yearzero.nin.com/ (http://yearzero.nin.com/) [accessed 22 February 2013]. Žižek, Slavoj. 2008. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso. Žižek, Slavoj. 2007. The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters. London: Verso. www.borrowers.uga.edu/1779/show 22/23 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation

www.borrowers.uga.edu/1779/show 23/23 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation

"Oh, teach me how I should forget to think": The

(/current) Pedagogical Problems of Pleasure and Rigor in Social Media and Shakespeare (/previous) KYLE DIROBERTO, UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA SOUTH (/about)

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates the anxiety exhibited by some academics over the use of new media in teaching Shakespeare. New media, some critics claim, impoverish academic studies, undermining communication skills and cognition by introducing the pollution of the market and the ideas of a populace deluded by pleasure-seeking into the realm of education. I question the bias that rejects the pleasure of new media, paying particular attention to laments about the decline of academic authority into "edutainment" and "infotainment," and I argue that the importance of new media lies, in part, in its ability to facilitate new modes of communication, to accommodate new constructions of identity and to contest older less objective views of language, knowledge, and selves.

Social media offers considerable benefits for the teacher of Shakespeare.1 My own investigation into the possibilities of social media for Shakespeare pedagogy culminated in an upper-division, hybrid Shakespeare class that was delivered through Interactional Television. Interactional Television works by broadcasting the instructor and students, who are situated in classes on multiple campuses, synchronously into each other's classrooms onto large television screens. There is always one class in which there are both an instructor and students, while the other rooms participate through video.

I incorporated the social media platforms Twitter and YouTube to offset some of the communication obstacles that this mode of instruction created.2 The www.borrowers.uga.edu/783098/show 1/23 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation students in this class were facing the difficulty of open access to instruction and to each other in the online component of the class, as well as to a televised environment in the face-to-face component of the course. These factors often impeded student communication. In addition to accommodating the students more effectively, this project provided an opportunity to test some of the theories I had encountered in researching the pedagogical affordances and constraints of new media. Social media intrigued me as a potential site of liberation, play, and collaboration, especially through constructions of social and personal identities through language. What I found confirmed much of my research. The students were enriched by their use of Twitter and YouTube. They gained scholarly independence, a greater appreciation for the power of language in a variety of mediums, and a sense of their place in an intellectual community. They also realized the significance of sociocultural constructions of identity in literature.

My initial forays into this Web 2.0 pedagogy suggested Shakespeare and social media would be a complementary match. "New literacies" scholar James Paul Gee, a strong advocate of technology in education, offers a rational research based approach to the benefits of Web 2.0 pedagogy, as well as a clear overview of the sociocultural structuring of identity through language and its practical application for students. He claims that there is a growing interest in "how people . . . are building identities (often several different identities) through networking with others, . . . virtual communication . . . and shared experiences" (Gee 2000, 40-41). His work uncovers deep connections between "literacy, society, and power" (Gee, 2000 26). According to Gee, "networks and their concomitant practices allow people to form multiple, changing and fluid [identities] with others" (Gee 2000, 42). Gee's work has informed my approach to Shakespeare. What I value most in teaching Shakespeare is examining dramatic characters and the dynamics of both representation and interpretation. Such dynamics reveal identity to be socially constructed, yet also potentially autonomous, and forgeable through effective language use. The approach to language, identity, and power in new literacies makes visible "the discursive, representational and semiotic processes through which identities are created, sustained and contested" (Gee 2000, 29). Since I had previously focused on theories of the carnivalesque in Shakespeare, the notion of contestation suited both my theoretical approach to Shakespeare's work and my pedagogical interest. Web 2.0 pedagogy intrigues me especially since it has been touted with encouraging students to "look for gaps in knowledge" and "imagine alternative interpretations" (Giglio and Venecek 2009, 13).

NEW MEDIA: LIABILITY OR LIBERATION? Considering Christy Desmet's salutary reminder that scholars "take into consideration" the opinion of both "admirers and detractors" (2009, 66) of social media, however, I had also become aware of, and concerned with, the dangers that critics claim this medium might pose to rigorous learning and literacy. Critics cautioned that enthusiasm for the use of technology might be at best "cultural intoxication" (McDonald 2009, 29), at worse "ignorance meets egoism meets bad taste meets mob rule" (Keen 2007, 1). Moreover, many of www.borrowers.uga.edu/783098/show 2/23 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation these scholars perceived an opposition between approaching the text socioculturally — what Russ McDonald refers to as the practice of criticism as "social work" (2009, 30) — and the ability to teach students deeper understandings of language through Shakespeare. Indeed, McDonald, writing from the perspective of Shakespeare studies, claims that "a robust anti- formalism" grew out of this socially oriented criticism, one that encouraged a "disapproval of attention to style or pattern . . ." (2009, 30). He further complains of students who know nothing about "parts of speech," "semantic content," or "syntax" (McDonald 2009, 30).

This was particularly disturbing to me, as I was also teaching linguistics and literature that semester, and most of my students would take both classes. I had not considered the incompatible philosophical differences behind these approaches to language and literature. In fact, I was excited by the potential of approaches from linguistics, especially syntax, semantics, and discourse analysis, not only to enrich the students' understanding of Shakespeare's use of language, but also to help students realize of the importance of language to reading, writing, and identity building more generally. Yet I was surprised to discover in rhetoric and composition courses a shift away from ideas about "correct" writing and toward student self-determination. This shift can be traced back to an important document promulgated by the committee on CCCC Language in 1974, the "Students' Right to Their Own Language" (Butler 2008, 108). Gee, indeed, describes new literacy studies as "sociocultural work" (Gee 2012, 2). Moreover, others in the field of composition studies complain that now when we have national searches for the next generation of compositionists, we are faced with applicants . . . influenced by critical theory, by Marxist theory, by our supposed liberatory duty to help students resist and subvert the dominant discourse, and by postmodernity, by Habermas, and by Derrida. (Wallace et al 2000, 92) Many academics seem to regard a student-centered approach to composition and language as a democratic practices that undermines more formal understandings of language and critical thought. Such academics suggest an opposition between the deleterious theory behind this change in composition studies and the cure offered by linguistics (Wallace et al 2000, 93). Even Stanley Fish has echoed the complaint that composition is without "any theory to be taken seriously", arguing alongside other disgruntled literary scholars that "composition is not doing its pedagogical job: 'students can't write clean English sentences'" (quoted in Butler 2008, 121).

Social media has become associated with this pedagogical problem, as academics continue to see the increased use of the Internet and of various nontraditional methods in literary scholarship as a threat to the foundation of the university and higher learning. For example, Sharon O'Dair, again writing from the perspective of Shakespeare studies, worries that these practices may constitute "professional suicide", and jeopardize the sanctity of the university, claiming that "democratization seems to be . . . a way to undermine further our commitments . . . to expertise . . . the craft of writing and close reading and . . . www.borrowers.uga.edu/783098/show 3/23 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation our relationship to the market, which . . . has been arm's length, largely non- instrumental or not-for-profit" (O'Dair 2011, 28, 91). Behind this critique of new methods, there may also be a view of the market and the populace as forces of corruption. The assumption would be that in a culture driven by pleasure rather than rigor, where everyone is "under the spell of the latest Apple gadget" (O'Dair 2011, 93), students cannot learn the craft of writing or the critical abilities involved in close reading.

Other scholars, however, have suggested that new media liberates education, increases critical thought and enhances understandings of communication. In fact, they attribute to new media the potential for enabling an epistemological revolution and promoting new levels of literacy. As Richard Lanham argues, we may expect a deal of commentary greeting the electronic modification of print literacy as the death of the Western self. Surely the opposite is taking place. The characteristically unstable Western self, by turns central and social, sincere and hypocritical, philosophical and rhetorical, is just what electronic literacy has been busy revitalizing (Lanham 1993, 25). More recently, Joan Walsh, editor of salon.com, praises Paul Levinson regarding his book New New Media for his revelations concerning this "glorious new era of media democracy" (Levinson 2009, back cover). Similarly, Gunther Kress and Theo Van Leeuwen, in Multimodal Discourse: The Modes of Contemporary Communication, are lauded for their efforts to "outline a new theory of communication for an age of interactive multimedia" (Kress and Van Leeuwen 2001, back cover).

The suggestion here of a new type of language and of language acquisition can be taken further. Based on linguistic research that reveals the language practices of culturally marginalized groups' to be complex and coherent, Gee argues for a more democratic approach to language instruction. In addition, he exposes the elitism that would exclude such language, arguing that those who maintain these notions belong to a particular discourse community: "Discourse demand[s] . . . performances which act as though its ways of being, thinking, acting, talking, writing, reading, and valuing are 'right' . . . the way . . . 'intelligent' . . . people behave" (Gee 2012, 215). Based on fear about "correct" language use, such exclusionary practices remain unexamined. Gee claims that no discourse has the "last word on truth" (2012, 215). Linguistics grammarians and psycholinguists substantiate Gee's argument against the unexamined acceptance of prescriptive rules (such as the rule to not split an infinitive), demonstrating such rules are frequently not based on the logical relationships that structure well-formed sentences in English, and, moreover, psycholinguists argue that ungrammatical writing does not suggest a lack of critical thought.3

In addition to biases about grammatical language use, critical reaction to the integration of elements from nonstandard American English culture, such as popular culture, has a long history, especially with regard to media and the teaching of Shakespeare. These ideological differences have continued to vacillate, perhaps tellingly, between (on the one hand) fears about the market, www.borrowers.uga.edu/783098/show 4/23 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation the appetite, the irrational, and (on the other) utopic visions of these pedagogical practices that claim media to be democratic, multicultural, "postpatriarchal," or "postgendered" (Burt 1998, 8). These fears regarding new media echo the early critique that accompanied the replacement of required literature with media considered "popular." As Richard Burt first illuminated in Unspeakable ShaXXXespeares: Queer Theory and American Kiddie Culture, conservative critics claim that [c]oncern about the "dumbing down" of America is widespread and well- justified. This country cannot expect a generation raised on gangster films and sex studies to maintain leadership in the world, or even its unity as a nation. Shakespeare has shaped our language and our culture. His work provides a common frame of reference that helps us into a single community (Burt 1998, 8). Even more than most areas of study, film studies (popular or otherwise) requires multidisciplinary understandings in literature, linguistics, sociology, psychoanalysis, and even technology; this hardly seems like a substitution in English departments that would suggest a "dumbing down" of American culture.

Requiring Shakespeare as the solution to academic dissolution is, as Burt claims, misinformed. The problem these days is not with whether or not to teach Shakespeare. The problem is which Shakespeare to teach. New media has already transformed Shakespeare: The conservative's fear about dropping a Shakespeare requirement seems misplaced, however, since it depends on an opposition between popular culture and Shakespeare (understood as high culture) that clearly no longer holds. It's not so much that Shakespeare is "out" in universities as that he has "popped" in, as it were (Burt 1998, 2). Although Burt is merely clarifying the nature of the real problem, thinking of present representations of Shakespeare as high culture, he also identifies deeply ingrained associations of popular culture and media with the devolution of critical thinking and communication skills.

Yet, even from the beginning, media scholars have suggested media's involvement in non-rational practices, while simultaneously revealing the role of new media as a promoter of critical thought. After all, Marshall McLuhan's statement that "electricity points the way to an extension of the process of consciousness itself, on a world scale, and without any verbalization whatever" (McLuhan 1994, 80) suggests that media would not involve communication as we know it. Moreover, his assertion that he "read only the right-hand page of serious books," while claiming, "if it [were] a frivolous relaxing book, [he] read every word . . ." (Bessai 1999), seems to confirm critics' fears regarding media's effect on reading and writing practices. Much of what he claimed, however, regarding the spectator's involvement in the processes of phenomena has expanded into to the processes of communication itself in new media.

www.borrowers.uga.edu/783098/show 5/23 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation This development suggests that the impact of media is ultimately to inspire analytical thinking and to create greater understandings regarding the potentials of language use. This media-inspired, spectator interest in processes is evident in McLuhan's discussion of the instant replay and the audience's involvement in sports. McLuhan claims that a famous American football player had told him that since the introduction of the instant replay We have now to play the game in such a way that the audience can watch the actual process that we are performing. They are not any longer interested in just the effect of the play; they want to see the nature of the play. So they have had to open up the play on the field to enable the audience to participate more fully in the process of football play. (1977) As is evidenced above, new media offers tools that enable a greater desire and potential for analysis and collective participation. Moreover, McLuhan also asserted that "learning itself [would] become the principal kind of production and consumption" and that "electric automation unites production, consumption, and learning in an inextricable process" (1994, 350). When the masses are feared or fetishized as irrational and where pleasure and learning are dissociated, this potential expansion of the learning environment is obscured, something perhaps McLuhan mocks when he claims to read "every word" of poorly written works.

SHAKESPEARE AND POPULAR ENTERTAINMENT Among Shakespeare critics, the ideological underpinnings of the bias against the expansive learning environment are further revealed in the mistaken view of Shakespeare as exemplifying linguistic rules that reflect a closed and stable meaning. Shakespeare's wordplay runs counter to the desire "to make language perspicuous" (Mahood 1957, 10). Moreover, his use of the polysemous pun (a word based on the same phonological content but open to multiple interpretations) seems to anticipate postmodern sensibilities regarding language and truth. It echoes, to some extent, Derrida's notion of the "fundamental" instability of language (Herrick 1997, 258). In the early modern period itself, John Eachard's suggested reform of education, which recommended purging "Punning, Quibling and that which they call Joquing, and such other delicaces of Wit" (Eachard 1670, 31) from academic exercise, would have had the striking effect of purging Shakespeare's own education. Notions of "clarity" and "truth" that inform the tendency to want to make writing transparent run counter to the language and complexity of Shakespeare's texts.

Shakespeare's writing practices are better described as taking part in Bakhtin's conception of the grammatical jocose, rather than in the rhetorical practices of the "clear English sentence" that, as Fish would have it, students lack. The disconnect between Shakespeare scholars and Shakespeare's style is evident as far back as Johnson who, as Mahood suggests, is now blamed for pointing out the flaws in Shakespeare's wordplay rather than appreciating them, even when they are strictly speaking "not working." Johnson admonishes Shakespeare's "improbable pun on bear the animal . . ." (quoted in Mahood 1957, 10) in the www.borrowers.uga.edu/783098/show 6/23 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation lines from Richard III: "You meane to beare me, not to beare with me" (3.1.128). Here the animal, the bear, does not make much sense in terms of meaning. It is an excuse to play with language for the sake of playing with it. As Stallybrass and White point out, in the grammatical jocose, adherence to "order is transgressed to reveal erotic and obscene or merely materially satisfying counter-meaning" in Shakespeare's work (1986, 11). As they further assert, "punning is one of the forms taken by grammatical jocose . . . the pun violates and so unveils the structure of prevailing and (pre-vailing) convention . . . Shakespeare's most indulged literary practice points to a plural, unfixed, comic view of the world" (1986, 11). Moreover, as Michael Bristol has long argued, "the enterprise of drama . . . bring[s] authoritative discourse into close, proximate relationship with the experience of everyday productive life so that it can be viewed experimentally and irreverently" (1985, 178). Shakespeare's use of language and his dramatic practice is far more democratic than it is elitist.

Rather like Shakespeare, promoters of new literacy challenge a blind adherence to traditional modes of communication. They argue that those who reject the epistemological frame involved in new media succumb to "nostalgia" for a social stability that has become "an obstacle to necessary action" (Kress 2010, 7). These traditional modes do not reflect the realities of contemporary experience. Kress, for example, uses the term "grammar" rather than "close reading" or "the craft of writing," but the referent is the same: it figures writing as a disciplined, orderly phenomenon that ultimately discovers and conveys "the truth," a construct that reflects a wishful thinking around "past social practices of particular groups" (2010, 7). Critics such as Kress claim that communication is far more ambiguous than traditionalists tend to acknowledge. In fact, uncertainty and instability in contemporary experience has only increased, and the truths of this experience, distrust of narratives and so on, require tools of communication with different affordances and constraints: "Representational and communicational practices are constantly altered, modified, as is all of culture, in line with and as an effect of social changes" (Kress 2010, 7). It may seem surprising but today's linguistics and media scholars are closer to thinking like Derrida — and I would add, like Shakespeare — than many might imagine. Here Kress acknowledges the instability of language, and Gee's focus on the sociocultural nature of language suggests Derrida's notion of alterity.

Recent shifts in pedagogical practices reveal that teaching Shakespeare with new media is particularly relevant to the times, not only in terms of new literacy but also in terms of what O'Dair refers to as the "democratization" of learning in current Shakespeare studies. Proponents tout social media as encouraging a more democratic, critical perspective and allowing for a more liberated examination of various discourses of those in power by the marginalized. They credit Shakespeare's plays with facilitating these very experiences in the classroom. Gee's sentiments regarding new literacy are echoed in the way in which Ramona Wray, for example, values the experience in her classroom, a classroom in which students are able to arrive

www.borrowers.uga.edu/783098/show 7/23 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation not only at a fresh sense of their agency but also at a consciousness about their own position in a society that has historically traded upon fixed roles and that has often elected to judge on the basis of predetermined affiliations" (Wray 2009, 157). Like Gee, Wray suggests that these student-directed discoveries regarding marginalized identity might be transformative. Quoting Judith Fetterly, she interestingly suggests that making "the system of power" open up to discussion regarding the construction of gendered identity eventually results in changes in the way gender is conceived (2009, 157). Moreover, a Shakespeare classroom, and in particular one that incorporates media and interpretive "play," can contribute to this "balance of power" shifting (2009, 157). Like Gee, Wray values education not for its sanctioning of "correct" ways of thinking or writing but rather for the material consequences that begin in the classroom: "gender aware pedagogy might have an effect, even a transformative function, one that invests in local policies and practices in order to fashion more constructive modes of understanding and ultimately political engagement" (Wray 2009, 157).

Social media's fostering of a collaborative, amateur culture can be similarly empowering. The use of YouTube in teaching Shakespeare is especially productive for establishing an active classroom and a sense of open discussion. As Desmet has illuminated, Coupled with the invitation to self-display is a concomitant imperative to share videos with friends, colleagues, and family . . . this imperative provides the best reason yet to use YouTube in the Shakespeare classroom. Participating in a virtual network of Shakespeare artists, both as producers and critics, gives students a real stake in the shaping of Shakespeare for our time (Desmet, 2009, 69). With this in mind, closer analysis of the interrelations between Shakespeare, social media, and new literacy seems particularly beneficial for new ways of conceiving not only the self but also how that self is created through language socially.

NEW MEDIA AND PEDAGOGY Technology is inevitably going to be a factor in the way students learn and its medium may ultimately shape the type of independent thinking and creativity students perform. As Kathleen Blake Yancy states, "it's not a question of whether you'll use technology to help students learn. It's a question of what kinds of technology you will include and when" (Yancey 2003, 105). Mark A. Gammon and Joanne White argue that "educators must be prepared to provide students with the tools to embrace . . . demands across all media" (2011, 330). They call on "educators and students to work collaboratively in addressing the critical competencies necessary for accessing, analyzing, evaluating, and creating media content" (Gammon and White 2011, 331). Louise Marshall and Will Slocombe also discuss the inevitability of technology's inclusion in the lives of future scholars, pointing out that "the move away from independent scholarly activity towards networks of www.borrowers.uga.edu/783098/show 8/23 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation communities of scholars engaged in technology-enhanced research needs to be reflected in the pedagogy of our subject" (2010, 101). Giving students an awareness and experience with these virtual communities is a pressing need.

More fundamentally, N. Katherine Hayles, in addressing the apparent disadvantages of technology for future scholars, emphasizes how online environments are changing the way we think. She reveals an opposition between "hyper attention," which "excels at negotiating rapidly changing environments in which multiple foci compete for attention," and "deep attention" which involves "focusing for long periods on a noninteractive object such as a Victorian novel or complicated math problem" (Hayles 2007, 188). For Hayles, however, this epistemological shift does not signal the destruction of our "economy, culture [or] our values" as it does for critics of technology such as Keen. Rather, she claims that the "expectations of educators" trained in "deep attention" can become "saturated with assumptions about [the] inherent superiority" of older modes of cognition and attempt to constrain young people "to the procrustean beds outfitted for them by their elders" (Hayles 2007, 188). She argues that this situation should instead give way to "a constructive synthesis" (Hayles 2007, 188). In fact, she reports that a task force created by the Federation of American Scientists found that learning with technology "teach[es] skills critical to productive employment in an information-rich society" (Hayles 2007, 195). Hayles introduces the notion that stimulation is important to this generations' ability to learn and points to the power of pleasure in motivating learning. What is particularly pleasurable and motivating to students — "feelings of autonomy, competence, and relatedness" (Hayles 2007, 195) — is also what educators, including Shakespeare instructors, seem to value.

Critics are increasingly seeing social media as the vehicle for new social truths and, simultaneously, as "ushering in a new era of communication" (Kress 2003, 22). Social media is also associated with challenging some of our notions of "what reading is; what the functions of writing are; [and] what the relation of language to thinking, to imagination, to creativity might be" (Kress 2003, 22). In fact, new media seems to offer both tools for close reading and those needed to be "fully involved in the contemporary struggle to define the self " (Bolter and Grusin 1999, 240). In the wake of the postmodern deconstruction of the subject, new media has become the lauded medium for expressing difference, undecidability, and play. For example, the "logic" of remediation in new media, in the formative work of Bolter and Grusin, reveals the way repressive constructions of the other, which marginalize identities within the dominant culture, are mirrored and exposed in the structure of new media. Though Bolter and Grusin are cautious of McLuhan's claim that the "medium is the message," and are mindful of Raymond Williams' concern regarding media not "causing social change" in a necessarily controlled or predictable "set of causes" (Williams 1975, 76-77), they nevertheless illuminate the importance of the medium to the message.

Indeed, through the phenomenon of remediation, Bolter and Grusin's description of new media suggests the ways in which the constructed nature of www.borrowers.uga.edu/783098/show 9/23 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation epistemological difference can be made manifest without necessarily excluding difference, reinforcing constructions, or precluding alternate truths. The interpretive freedom Wray seeks to realize in her classroom can be understood as an effect of remediation. As Wray claims, in film "a canonical Shakespearean script is here experienced in a moment of revision" (Wray 2009, 148). These revisions expose stable notions of truth to the pressures of experience and invention, and ultimately reveal "truth" to be open to interpretation. Precluding alternative epistemological truths and reinforced constructions of identity is a real problem for feminist scholars and teachers. As Teresa de Lauretis reveals, this dilemma is one we face almost daily in our work, namely, that most of the available theories of reading, writing, sexuality, ideology, or any other cultural production are built on male narratives of gender, bound by heterosexual contract; narratives which persistently tend to re-produce themselves" (de Lauretis 1987, 25). As Ayanna Thompson's discussion of YouTube posts makes clear, however, sometimes these democratic spaces of critical involvement, even concerning acts of remediation, merely serve to reinforce dominant discourse — as, for example, in comments about a version of Othello on YouTube, where "responses explicitly and implicitly work to recreate and reinstate the power of Iago's rhetorical position as 'the Man,' the one who controls the positions and actions of both women and minorities" (Thompson 2011, 161). Yet, as I will discuss latter, who plays "the Man" can potentially alter even that message.

For now, I want to return to Bolter and Grusin and argue that their theory of remediation suggests the ways in which new media bring together and potentially overturn the binary oppositions that underwrite constructions of difference in older media. Truths, for example, associated with male narratives (or, in this case, "the male gaze," or "transparency") compete and combine with their binary opposite, the "hypermediated" (a gaze characterized as feminine due to its excess, albeit one that is again a creation of male narratives) (Bolter and Grusin 1999, 240). Remediation potentially exposes perspectives that express desire and bias.

There is a possibility, however, that in these alternative ways of thinking and writing the critic, like the feminist scholar, can reinforce the very bias she/he works to overturn. Marcel O'Gorman, in his attempt to promote the transformation of scholarship through new media, seems to agree with O'Dair's perspective when he claims that academic rigor is a product of print culture. He capitulates to this way of thinking when he associates rational thought only with print, offering alternatives to critical writing and reading strategies in concepts like Ezra Pound's "logopoeia," which is based on the logic of poetry but privileges context and expectation above meaning (O'Gorman 2006, 28). This is also true of Gregory Ulmer's "puncept" (1988) which, following the structure of puns, claims to allow for a more poetic association between seemingly unrelated words or ideas in writing. These alternative organizational strategies, which are meant to replace more rational and rigor-based models, no longer appropriate for a post-print visual age, www.borrowers.uga.edu/783098/show 10/23 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation situate new media as non-rational. Rather than exposing the struggle between representations of ways of knowing, this approach dogmatizes these insights into practices. Conversely, I would argue, that what is important is the freedom of coinciding truths. According to Bakhtin (and, I would add, Shakespeare and Derrida), in "the ideological horizon of any epoch and any social group there is not one, but several mutually contradictory truths, not one but several diverging ideological paths" (Medvedev and Bakhtin 1978, 19). Such closed, prescriptionist approaches to thinking are part of the struggle in the current era.

Elite discourses purporting to find a lack of reason in popular culture are founded on the idea that practical rather than critical thought characterizes the masses and, furthermore, that the value of practical thought invites the pollution of the market into the sacred spaces that constitute academia. O'Gorman, however, usefully points to the materiality behind the marketplace as "irrational" contestation of this elite discourse: It is the spirit of the baroque regime . . . the ocular madness definitive of the baroque which seems to reign supreme in postmodern culture. This baroqueness is heightened to an unprecedented degree by electronic technologies of representation and reproduction, which insure that every facet of daily life is saturated with pictures. Western culture as it stands today is often viewed as a veritable ocular orgy, a culture that invented the term "eye candy" (2006, 28). In his appreciation of the market and the sensibilities of the populace, O'Gorman (like Bakhtin) sees in this "ocular orgy" the possibility of a liberating discourse that will not only further democratize learning but will usher in new forms of social cognition. This new epistemology, suggests O'Gorman, will lead to new ontologies that may possibly overturn older socially constructed traditional categories of being.

It would seem, therefore, that new media offer a revolutionary potential, especially considering their capacity for alternative constructions of identity. These alternatives do not have to be positioned outside of canonical critical discourses or canonical literature in order to be democratic and even revolutionary. This discourse of liberation, oppression, and the potential hierarchical inversion introduced by the market, which renders some scholars anxious about the canon and leaves others celebrating the collapse of official discourse, has long been evident in Shakespeare's work, in particular in Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night's Dream. Indeed, media scholars have yet to appreciate how central Shakespeare's works are to understandings of new media.

A Midsummer Night's Dream, for example, is ostensibly about the antics of romantic love, but it is also an overview of the epistemological anxiety around the purity of noble ideas and the pollution of grotesque realism introduced by the lower classes. The play suggests that the critical perspective created by the haphazard stumbling of a grotesque populace produce something much closer to "truth" than does the perspective of the learned. Moreover, the lower-class's www.borrowers.uga.edu/783098/show 11/23 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation bodily disruption of transcendent notions around love and art involves the audience in the pleasure of critique and the liberality of laughter in denying such fantasies. When Theseus reads of "the thrice three Muses morning for the death / Of Learning, late decease'd into beggary" (5.1.52-3), among the revels in A Midsummer Night's Dream, we learn that anxiety over the corruption of purity in scholarship are not unique to our own period. Immediately after this revel, Theseus finds a farce written by "hard-handed men," or laborers, who, in an accidental spirit of remediation, confuse the genre of comedy and tragedy and the forms of poetry and drama, and turn a classical story of romantic love into a bawdy farce.

The aristocracy instantly seizes upon the laborers' play, referred to as "a tedious brief scene of young Pyramus / and his love Thisby, very tragical mirth" (5.1.56-7). Theseus mockingly asks, "Merry and tragical? Tedious and brief? / That is hot ice and wondrous strange snow. / How shall we find the concord in this discord" (5.1.58-60). In fact, the play "Pyramus and Thisby" echoes in performance and rehearsal much of what is also found in Romeo and Juliet: that is, the remediation of poetry into drama and the concrete representations of rhetorical figures as actualities. Rather like the medieval allegories of the past, Starveling announces, "This lanthorn doth the horned moon / present" (5.1. 244). Likewise, the physical presence of the actor playing 'Wall' complicates the allegorical wall that typically separates the lovers, when the lovers talk and try to kiss through his chink.

Shakespeare's artistic decision to penetrate imaginative fantasies is further evident in Romeo and Juliet, where he makes Petrarchan "tropes come true" (Slater 1988, 142). Juliet, who is both sexually passionate and virtuous, "fiend angelical, / Dove-feathered raven" (3.2.75-6), is a Petrarchan paradox. As Rosalie Colie points out (1974), this oxymoron (or paradoxical figure of speech), is also a cultural paradox in the early modern period. Juliet represents, in Bakhtinian terms, simultaneously the classical and the grotesque body. Not coincidently, in the above scene, then, the authorship of Romeo and Juliet is alluded to, written as it is by a playwright who was himself not that far removed from the "rude mechanicals," who never "labor'd in their minds till now" (5.1.73).

Bottom's inclusion of the bodily instances the complexity of Shakespeare's art. Theseus mocks the players' ineptitudes throughout their performance. The play, however, reveals that their oxymoronic language — a parody of Petrarchan conventions — is more apt than Theseus is aware: love, in the play, is violent and feckless, faithless and kind. The nobility's mistaken judgment of the rude mechanicals' play as insignificant undermines the hierarchy of knowledge, bringing the audience's attention to the nobility, who are equally unaware of their follies and yet remain haughty fools despite their own bungling farce of love. This farce, however, lacks the redeeming laughter that the lower classes enact. The latter's performance opens up the fissures of official discourse by introducing the grotesque body as a critical overturning of the fantasy of transcendence. As Bristol observes, regarding the fairy world, "the presence of 'hard-handed men' — weavers, carpenters, joiners — within www.borrowers.uga.edu/783098/show 12/23 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation an epically distanced mythological realm bring that realm into crude contact with the contemporaneous world of productive life and familiar language of the street, the workshop and the marketplace" (Bristol 1985, 178). This argument could also extended to the myth-saturated world of the court.

Though the mechanicals seem largely unconscious of their bawdry, it is their own rudeness that produces the interpretation that functions as an astute criticism of the constructed nature of transcendent truths in the play. This critique parallels the nobility's often tediously clever and humorously weak literary criticism. The traditionally pedantic "logical quibbles" and "verbal conceits" (L'Estrange, 1878, 257) that mark the exchange between Demetrius, Lysander, and Theseus are boring because of their essential lack of mental work: Lysander. This lion is a very fox for his valor. Theseus. True; and a goose for his discretion. Demetrius. Not so, my lord; for his valor cannot carry his discretion, and the fox carries the goose. Theseus. His discretion, I am sure, cannot carry his valor; for the goose carries not the fox. (A Midsummer Night's Dream, 5.1.24-30) This humor and logic based on tradition appear anemic next to Bottom's surprisingly elaborate farce. Shakespeare's close reading of culture, like Bottom's, is deeply critical and yet it was not associated with print culture primarily. Its medium was the stage. The complexity of Shakespeare's works were, in part, a product of the liberty afforded him by the stage, a liberty that involved his audience in the production of his meaning.

In a teaching context a few semesters ago, I experienced something approaching the liberty Shakespeare himself may have found through the stage, through a student-initiated project involving student performances of Shakespeare via YouTube. I had been teaching Shakespeare almost completely through textual analysis and historical background, rather than through student-centered interpretation and performance. First, I was conscious that my students had been taught Romeo and Juliet in high school. Second, I worked from the assumption that they had been taught a romantic view of the play that would probably not have focused on grotesque realism. I therefore wanted to introduce a more feminist approach. To this end, I sought to lead the students through a close reading of the play in which we examined the fetishizing of chastity and the criminality of Juliet's sexuality. For example, we analyzed the similarities between the invocations to night spoken by Juliet and by Lady Macbeth. The first reads:

www.borrowers.uga.edu/783098/show 13/23 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Come, civil night, Thou sober-suited matron, all in black, . . . Hood my unmann'd blood . . . With thy black mantle; till strange love, grown bold Think true love acted simple modesty Come, night; come . . . (Romeo and Juliet, 3.2.10-17) The similar passage spoken by Lady Macbeth follows: Come, you spirits That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, . . . make thick my blood; . . . That no compunctious visitings of nature Shake my fell purpose. . . Come to my woman's breasts . . . you murdering ministers, Wherever in your sightless substances You wait on nature's mischief. Come, thick night. (Macbeth, 1.5.38-49).

The result of a sustained analysis of these passages really disturbed a few of the female students in the class, not because they did not want to think critically or read closely, but because they wanted to refute my reading of Juliet's criminality. I realized their opposition through their project and through speaking with them afterward. My assumptions were wrong about their experience with the sexuality. Some of them knew and enjoyed the bawdry. In a YouTube video in which they performed "Pyramus and Thisby," they challenged the notion, as advanced within the text, that feminine sexuality is criminal. In an uncanny moment, in which I could see my approach as utterly alien to my intentions, the students made me realize that my attempt to illuminate the early modern view of female sexuality as criminal involved me in perpetuating that view, which the students would not tolerate. This reminded me of de Lauretis's claim that one can inadvertently reinforce ideology. More importantly, however, it suggested her notion that it is "the spaces in the margins of hegemonic discourses, social, spaces carved in the interstices of institutions and in the chinks and cracks of the power-knowledge apparati" where empowerment for the marginalized becomes possible (de Lauretis 1987, 25).4

After this initial experience, I designed a class in which I could experiment with social media to test whether or not it would create more self-reliant students and foster self-directed learning. I wanted to determine what bearing these tools might have on critical thinking and the art of close reading and writing if made an integral part of the class. Moreover, I was teaching the class via Interactional Television, as mentioned. Students often complain of feeling disconnected in ITV classes and hybrids. While I was not able to overcome www.borrowers.uga.edu/783098/show 14/23 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation this completely, social media importantly helped the students feel more connected, as evidenced by the responses students gave in the Teacher Course Evaluations to the question "what did you especially like about the class": I really enjoyed looking at the different plays and tweeting about what we thought. I liked the online discussion and assignments, allowing us to be able to speak more freely without fear of being wrong or right. I enjoyed the many different mediums she used to encourage cooperative learning and feel she succeeded.

Twitter proved especially useful here. I set up an account on the micro- blogging site and followed only members with tweets pertaining to Shakespeare or those users who were Shakespeare scholars. I directed the students to create their own account and to follow these people as well. As Terri L. Towner and Caroline Lego Muñoz recommend, I encouraged students to create "a separate profile for professional use only" (Towner and Muñoz 2011, 51). In particular, the platform was used to facilitate questions both during and also after class. Although it was not used that frequently, Twitter proved attractive to those students who were not on the same campus at which I was teaching and who might otherwise have been reluctant to contribute because interaction through the medium of television was too intimidating.

One student in particular, who was very intimidated by public speaking, was able to use Twitter to deepen the others' experience of the material and to allow me to see the level of this student's engagement. Over the course of the semester, this student seemed transformed in terms of confidence and self- reliance. It was through one of this student's posts (first attempted on Twitter and then emailed directly to me later), that I once again experienced this liberated learning that seems to be especially facilitated by the use of social media.

In addition, by retaining many of the exercises from more traditional teaching methods (such as teaching the formal elements of drama and by applying this knowledge to the analysis of passages and to understandings of character, setting, audience), students learnt to produce close readings. The learning potential of social media platforms was further pursued through student assignments. I encouraged students to research tweets and also YouTube videos. The information — or data — that was gathered from these exercises allowed students to participate in discussions about Shakespearean texts and characters. It also acted as important preparatory work for the students' essay assignments.

Voicethread is another of the social media platforms that I also incorporated into the class, but not until the middle of the semester. This platform allows a student or instructor to post an image or video. Each student can then comment on the post (either through voice or texts). The comments appear as icons around the image or video. The student or instructor can then click on the icon to read or listen to the responses and can continue responding to responses.

www.borrowers.uga.edu/783098/show 15/23 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation There were many instances of independent and critical thinking in this class. They not only focused on what a work such as Othello revealed about socially constructed identities in the early modern period; they also focused on how formal elements in the play contributed to these constructions or broke them down. For example, though I had attempted to stay away from traditional interpretations of issues of race, gender, and sexuality in order to test the hypothesis that social media would lead students to independent realization in this area, and to avoid perpetuating racist, sexist, or elitist discourse in the attempt to critique it (I mainly focused on problems with the history of performance in "Othello"), this proved more difficult than I had foreseen. Discussing the internalization of racist discourse in Othello's final speech proved irresistible. Social media fostered independent critical thought once again, and it did so even when students were led into a standard reading of certain passages, as exemplified in Stephen Cohen's article "Identifying with the Other in Othello." In his essay, Cohen reveals that in popular readings of Othello the focus has traditionally been on the internalizing of racism (Cohen 2011, 171). These readings culminate in a reading of act five, scene two, lines 361-5. One of the student's VoiceThreads, which I have transcribed, gives the standard reading of this passage, more or less as it was discussed in class.5: As we can see, [the] ending speech is very reserved and calm with an overall tone of deep regret punctuated by self-loathing, especially on the noticeable intonations, on the foreign words such as turban Turk, uncircumsized dog, and base Indian . . . Within the text . . . there is clearly some sense that at least Othello believes that . . . his foreignness is to blame for his rash actions. The use of foreignness as a negative descriptor in Othello's speech shows this. This is the secondary tragedy . . . Othello is a great man plagued by doubts and begins to believe the racist and ugly lies about his own race to be true. Beyond the issue of "intonation," which may be, in part, the result of the focus on language in the linguistics and literature class that I taught, this VoiceThread is evidence that the students were critically analyzing (in the way that students often do in papers) the last lines of the play.

Cohen examines this phenomenon in his criticism in terms of recognition, a concept important to race theory, but he does so as if this were only important to members of his reading audience who were not part of ethnic minorities. A look at his discussion will reveal Cohen's good intentions and simultaneously what is sometimes problematic about these types of intentions. According to Cohen, Othello's tragedy evokes, through its depiction and production of empathetic identification, an ideology of difference: one that demands that we neither reject the other as inhuman nor reimagine it as a version of ourselves, but that we empathize with the other as other, no matter how disrobing or frightening. (Cohen 2011, 179). It was after this type of discussion in class, in which the class had been referring to "us" and to problems of "recognition" with difference and "otherness" (in its represented "monstrosity"), that I received the following www.borrowers.uga.edu/783098/show 16/23 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation "almost tweet," in the form of an email from one of the students who, as I already mentioned, had felt uncomfortable about speaking in class: I wanted to post this question on Twitter but couldn't because it exceeded the word limit. But it's something that sparked my interest since last week's discussion. Regarding Othello being performed in blackface, you mentioned that it might help in bringing out a sense of "alienness" and exaggeration for the audience. But I'm wondering that it wouldn't change depending on who the audience is? For a black person isn't it perhaps alienating and off-putting to see themselves being kind of caricatured and performed in such an exaggerated, maniacal way? I wonder how these constructions affect the mentality and esteem of those it's being projected on. Upon returning to class, this very insightful comment generated much discussion. Our discussion of Othello, as the above critical examination also reveals, had been directed at a white audience in ways that were problematic for a black audience.

Later, a student also discovered "Sir Patrick Stewart: Car Pool," an interview with the actor posted by carpool UK available exclusively on YouTube. The video demonstrates the role of art in sociocultural identity building, and is a particularly powerful instance of active audience participation in that process. In the video, Stewart, fascinated by the results of his experiment with a "negative" Othello, describes black and Latino inner city school children's identification with a black Iago. The following is a transcript of the interview: I remember one school's matinee. Full of inner city kids. Must've been 95% black or Latino. And we came off of the curtain call. And the kids are going crazy. And Ron Canada, who played Iago, was the penultimate one to go on. And he came on and there was cheering, screaming, and a chant began: "He the man. He the man." And I looked at the stage manager in the corner, and I said, "I'm not going on. I'm not going on. Just bring the curtain down. That's the end of the curtain." And the stage manager said to me, "Hey, this was your fucking idea. Get on there, and I walked on and it went shoop [indicating silence], and I walked to the middle of the stage. And as I got to the middle of the stage, one black actor Teagle F. Bougere, who was playing Cassio, he stepped forward and pointed at me, and he said, "No. He the man. He the man." And the cast took it up, and there was this sort of chanting battle happening. It was one of the most exciting experiences I've ever had on stage. It was incredible. (2011) This staging demonstrates a battle between the authority of the players and the audience regarding whose performance is of value. While the inner city kids value Canada's performance because they identify with him in terms of race or alterity, the cast values the performance of Stewart, who, color aside, is one of the most renowned Shakespeare performers of our time. The interpretive decisions of these kids are crucial to their own sense of identity. I only ask why anyone would want to ignore the importance of the social work literature does and why critics continue to believe that recognizing, even cultivating this www.borrowers.uga.edu/783098/show 17/23 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation "social work," would exclude critical thought or deeper understandings of language or literature?

NEW MEDIA AND ACADEMIC RIGOR By way of a final illustration that social media can facilitate deep discussions of language, sociocultural identity building and close reading, I want to reflect on our use of the Royal Shakespeare Company's "Sonnet 138—Trevor Nunn coaches David Suchet for Master Class" (1979). In the video, Nunn takes the innovative step of directing a sonnet so as to illustrate the dramatic nature of nondramatic literature. In linguistics and literature class, we were discussing "role relations" in semantics. This would be considered a formalist analysis of sonnet 138, and the close reading that occurs as Nunn directs this sonnet is remarkable. He reveals through the unfolding drama of the poem how much the argument springs from the realization of not only the speaker's particular identity but also what the speaker attempts to do through language to represent that identity, his purpose and his audience. This analysis would have fit as well in the social media Shakespeare class as it did in the linguistics and literature one.

In fact, such an analysis could facilitate a discussion of the constituents or conceptual notions of semantic roles and traditional parts of speech. In both semantic analysis and in writing simple English sentences, thinking in terms of parts of speech such as verbs is crucial, so too are parts of speech in linguistics, as "semantic roles denote the underlying relationship that a participant has with the relation of the clause expressed in the main verb" (Kim and Sells, 2008). Indeed, much of what I taught in one class spilled over into the next. In one assignment in which I had the students memorize a passage in order to focus on language, it soon became obvious that figures such as alliteration served as mnemonic devices. We had looked at sound and meaning in a section of the linguistics class, but this approach would also fit well in a rhetoric and literature class. Words that share stems were there just when you needed them, when you couldn't remember what came next. I could have used the moment to talk about polyptoton or other figures of speech, as student interest dictated. I could have built a module or discussed a play primarily in terms of language, and YouTube would have enriched that experience.

What is more, it seems that the only place undergraduate students are going to be exposed to the art of language these days — its syntax, semantics, and style — is in literature or linguistics classes. According to Peter Elbow, whom Butler refers to as "one of composition's best known scholars" (2008, 136): The culture of literary studies puts a high value on style and on not being like everyone else . . .What could be more wonderful than the pleasure of creating or appreciating forms that are different, amazing, outlandish, useless-the opposite of ordinary, everyday pragmatic? (Elbow 2002, 542). The results of using social media in this class suggest that it does not endanger close reading and critical thinking. Nor does it undermine a deeper appreciation of language. What may endanger the success of students, www.borrowers.uga.edu/783098/show 18/23 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation however, is not teaching them how to navigate new online environments, to practice technology-enhanced research, and to interact with each other as online communities, related processes that in turn foster identity building. We know that with or without proper language, it is impossible to teach students how not to think.

NOTES 1. I would like to express my gratitude to Maurizio Calbi, David Sterling Brown, Meg Lota Brown, and Stephen O'Neill for their guidance and suggestions on early drafts of this article. 2. Through the Office for the Responsible Conduct of Research, I applied to the Internal Review Board for permission to conduct human research. My project was approved. Once the students, whose data I wanted to use, consented, I was allowed to publish that data from the class, provided I withheld the students' identity, including age, race, and gender. 3. See for example, Andrew Carnie's explanation of the "utterly ungrammatical sentences" (2007, 34) that can result from not splitting infinitives. See also Steven Pinker's debunking of the idea that ungrammatical language use in "culturally deprived" American black children results in "'non-logical modes of expressive behavior'" (1994, 16). 4. This is not so say that students do not have agency, just that students have traditionally occupied this position in the power structure of the classroom, the position Anis Bawarshi describes as "passive recipient" (Bawarshi 2003, 123-4). 5. Permission to transcribe and publish the student's VoiceThread was granted by the IRB at the University of Arizona as part of the approval of this project.

REFERENCES Bawarshi, Anis S. 2003. Genre and the Invention of the Writer: Reconsidering the Place of Invention in Composition. Logan, UT: Utah State University Press. Bessai, Carl, dir. 1999. "Out of Orbit: The Life and Times of Marshall McLuhan." Life and Times. CBC, 30 November. Bolter, J. David, and Richard A. Grusin. 1999. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Bristol, Michael D. 1985. Carnival and Theater: Plebeian Culture and the Structure of Authority in Renaissance England. New York: Methuen. Burt, Richard. 1998. Unspeakable ShaXXXspeares: Queer Theory and American Kiddie Culture. New York: St. Martin's Press. Butler, Paul. 2008. Out of Style: Reanimating Stylistic Study in Composition and Rhetoric. Logan, UT: Utah State University Press. Carnie, Andrew. 2007. Syntax: A Generative Introduction. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

www.borrowers.uga.edu/783098/show 19/23 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Cohen, Stephen. 2011. "I Am What I Am Not: Identifying with the Other in Othello." Shakespeare Survey 64: 163-79. Colie, Rosalie Littell. 1974. Shakespeare's Living Art. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. de Lauretis, Teresa. 1987. Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Desmet, Christy. 2009. "Teaching Shakespeare with YouTube." The English Journal 99.1: 65-70. Eachard, John. 1696. The Grounds and Occasions of the Contempt of the Clergy and Religion Enquired Into: In a Letter Written to R. L. London: Printed for E. Blagrave. Elbow, Peter. 2002. "The Culture of Literature and Composition: What Could Each Learn from the Other?" College English 64. 5: 533-46. VoiceThread recording. 10/30/2013. Tucson. Transcribed by Christine McGarvey [accessed 1/31/2014]. Gammon, Mark A., and Joanne White. 2011. "Social Media Literacy: Challenges and Opportunities for Higher Education." In Educating Educators with Social Media, 329-46. Vol. 1. Edited by Charles Wankel. Bingley, UK: Emerald Group. Gee, James Paul. 2012. Social Linguistics and Literacies: Ideology in Discourses. London: Routledge. Gee, James Paul. 2000. "Chapter 3: Identity as an Analytic Lens for Research in Education." Review of Research in Education 25: 1 (2000): 99-125. Giglio, Katheryn and John Venecek. 2009. "The Radical Historicity of Everything: Exploring Shakespearean Identity with Web 2.0." Digital Humanities Quarterly 3.3. Guillemette, Lucie, and Josiane Cossette. 2006. "Bienvenue Sur Le Site Web De Signo !" Signo. Available online at: http://www.signosemio.com/ (http://www.signosemio.com/) [Accessed 18 September 2014]. Hayles, Katherine N. 2007. "Hyper and Deep Attention: The Generational Divide in Cognitive Modes." The Profession. 187-199. Herrick, James A. 2001. The History of Rhetoric: An Introduction. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. Joseph, Kris. "Sonnet 138 — Trevor Nunn Coaches David Suchet for Master Class." YouTube. Available online at: http://youtu.be/9YLhu_f4Pwg (http://youtu.be/9YLhu_f4Pwg) [Accessed 18 September 2014]. Keen, Andrew. 2007. The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture. New York: Doubleday/Currency. Kim, Jong-Bok, and Peter Sells. 2008. English Syntax: An Introduction. Stanford: CSLI Publications. Kress, Gunther R. 2010. Multimodality: A Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communication. London: Routledge. Kress, Gunther R. 2003. Literacy in the New Media Age. London: Routledge. www.borrowers.uga.edu/783098/show 20/23 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Kress, Gunther R., and Theo Van Leeuwen. 2001. Multimodal Discourse: The Modes and Media of Contemporary Communication. London: Arnold. Lanham, Richard. 1993. The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology and the Arts. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. L'Estrange, Alfred Guy Kingan. 1878. History of English Humour. London: Hurst and Blackett. Levinson, Paul. 2009. New New Media. Boston: Allyn & Bacon. Mahood, M. M. 1957. Shakespeare's Wordplay. London: Methuen. Marshall, Louis, and Will Slocombe. 2010. "From Passive to Active Voice: Technology, Community, and Literary Studies." In Teaching Literature at a Distance: Open, Online and Blended Learning. Edited by Takis Kayalis and Anastasia Natsina. London: Continuum. 99-110. McDonald, Russ. 2009. "Planned Obsolescence or Working at the Words." In Teaching Shakespeare: Passing It On, 27-41. Edited by G. B. Shand. Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell. McLuhan, Marshall, and Lewis Lampham. 1994. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Cambridge: MIT Press. McLuhan, Marshall. 1977. Appearance on ABC Radio National. Sydney, Australia. 27 June. Available online: https://youtu.be/3A_O7M3PQ-o (https://youtu.be/3A_O7M3PQ-o) [accessed 29 April 2016]. Medvedev, Pavel and Mikhail Bakhtin. 1978. The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship. Translated by Albert J. Wehrle. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. O'Dair, Sharon. 2011. "'Pretty Much How the Internet Works'; or, Aiding and Abetting the Deprofessionalization of Shakespeare Studies." Shakespeare Survey 64: 83-96. O'Gorman, Marcel. 2006. E-crit: Digital Media, Critical Theory and the Humanities. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Pinker, Steven. 1994. The Language Instinct: How The Mind Creates Language. New York: HarperCollins. Royal Shakespeare Company. 1979. "Sonnet 138-Trevor Nunn Coaches David Suchet for Master Class." Royal Shakespeare Company. Perf. Trevor Nunn, David Suchet. Uploaded by Kris Joseph. YouTube. Available online at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YLhu_f4Pwg (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YLhu_f4Pwg) [accessed 16 May 2016]. Shakespeare, William. 1997. Macbeth. In The Riverside Shakespeare, edited by G. Blakemore Evans and J. J. M. Tobin. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Shakespeare, William. 1997. A Midsummer Night's Dream. In The Riverside Shakespeare, edited by G. Blakemore Evans and J. J. M. Tobin. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

www.borrowers.uga.edu/783098/show 21/23 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Shakespeare, William. 1997. Richard III. In The Riverside Shakespeare, edited by G. Blakemore Evans and J. J. M. Tobin. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Shakespeare, William. 1997. Romeo and Juliet. In The Riverside Shakespeare, edited by G. Blakemore Evans and J. J. M. Tobin. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. "Sir Patrick Stewart Carpool." 2010. 16 June. Available online at: http://youtu.be/zvNMYqWZ4BM (http://youtu.be/zvNMYqWZ4BM) [Accessed 18 September 2014]. Slater, Ann Pasternak. 1988. "Petrarchanism Come True in Romeo and Juliet." In Images of Shakespeare: Proceedings. Edited by Werner Habicht, Roger Pringle, and David John Palmer. Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press. 129-50. Stallybrass, Peter, and Allon White. 1986. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Takayoshi, Pamela, and Brian A. Huot. 2003. "The Pleasure of Digital Conversations: Lesson Challenge, Recommendations, and Reflections." In Teaching Writing with Computers: An Introduction. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2003. 105-77. Teacher-Course Evaluation for Kyle DiRoberto Office of Instruction and Assessment [accessed 9/22/2015]. Thompson, Ayanna. 2011. Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Towner, Terri and Caroline Lego Muñoz. 2011. "Facebook and Education: A Classroom Connection?" In Educating Educators with Social Media. Vol. 1. Edited by Charles Wankel, 33-57. Bingley, UK: Emerald. Ulmer, Gregory L. 1988. "The Puncept in Grammatology." In On Puns: The Foundation of Letters. Edited by Jonathan Culler. Oxford: Blackwell. 164-89. VoiceThread recording. 10/30/2013. Tucson. Transcribed by Christine McGarvey [accessed 1/31/2014]. Wallace, Ray, Alan Jackson, and Susan Lewis. Wallace. 2000. Reforming College Composition: Writing the Wrongs. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Williams, Raymond. 1975. Television: Technology and Cultural Form. New York: Schocken Books. Wray, Ramona. 2009. "Communicating Differences: Gender, Feminism, and Queer Studies in the Changing Shakespeare Curriculum." In Teaching Shakespeare: Passing It On. Edited by G. B. Shand. Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell. 142-159. Yancey, Kathleen Blake. 2003. "The pleasures of digital discussions: lessons, challenges, recommendations, and reflections." In Teaching Writing with Computers: An Introduction, edited by Pamela Takayoshi and Brian Huot. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. 105-77.

ONLINE RESOURCES www.borrowers.uga.edu/783098/show 22/23 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation VoiceThread. https://voicethread.com (https://voicethread.com).

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Hamlet Redux: Two Korean Productions that Re-

(/current) stage Shakespeare's Play between Tradition and Today (/previous) JAN CREUTZENBERG, FREIE UNIVERSITÄT BERLIN, SUNGSHIN (/about) UNIVERSITY

(/archive) ABSTRACT | REFERENCES

ABSTRACT

This essay reviews two Korean appropriations of Hamlet that adapt Shakespeare's play to contemporary times, employing different traditional performing arts.

Hamlet Cantabile, by Performance Group Tuida, adapted and directed by Bae Yosup, compositions and musical director: Han Jeong Lim, stage and puppet design: Kim Kyung Hee, actors: Hwang Hyeran, Choi Jaeyoung, Choi Soojin, Gong Jun, Premiere: June 22, 2005. (Seen at Culture Space "Yesul Teotbat," Hwacheon County in Gangwon Province, September 19, 2015, 8-10 pm.)

Pansori Hamlet Project, by Gugak Musical Collective Taroo, adapted and directed by Park Sun-hee, musical director: Jung Jongim, stage design: Kim Dae-han, actors: Song Bora, Jo Ella, Lee Won-kyoung, Choi Jee-sook, Showcases: December 13-16, 2012, August 15, 2013, Premiere: February 20, 2014. (Seen at Seoul Arts Center, Jayu Theater, October 23, 2015, 8-10 pm.)

Maybe with the exception of German romanticists, all over the world creative theater-makers are struggling hard to make Shakespeare's most notorious anti-hero their own. That is no different in Korea, from quotations in progressive magazines of the early twentieth century to doublet-and-hose productions on proscenium stages in the 1950s and 60s and "intercultural" adaptations by directors interested in the resurrection of traditional Korean arts since the 70s. Lee Hyon-u (2011) focuses on "shamanistic" Hamlet- www.borrowers.uga.edu/783209/show 1/11 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation productions that incorporate rituals or scenes of possession, a trend that "emerged in an era of democratization, globalization, and extended freedom of the 1990s." He considers them a means "to exorcise the Korean problem of 'to be or not to be' that results from a century of colonialism, war, dictatorship, and economic crisis" (105-106).

Both Ensemble Tuida's Hamlet Cantabile and the Pansori Hamlet Project by Gugak Musical Collective Taroo feature incantations and share an obsession with death. However, in re-staging Hamlet for contemporary audiences in Korea, they focus more on methodological issues than national trauma. How can we talk and relate to a 400-year-old play from Europe today? That is the question they throw into the ring. While both productions allude to shamanist practices (Hamlet Cantabile in fact features as the "highlight of shamanistic Hamlets" among Lee Hyon-u's examples [2011, 119]), they also draw on other cultural traditions to show and tell the Prince's story. Hamlet Cantabile incorporates methods from a variety of folk arts, including puppetry, and commedia dell'arte. In Taroo's Pansori Hamlet Project, as the title indicates, the plot is presented in the style of pansori, a Korean singing-storytelling tradition. But these two productions, both of which I saw in 2015, also continue to create their own staging traditions through a continuing process of reflection, refinement, and update.

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The coronation: Puppets of Gertrude and Claudius; copyright Tuida Right after the premiere in 2005, Hamlet Cantabile was invited to a Shakespeare-Festival at the National Theater of Korea. In the following years, the production underwent some modifications in cast, scope, and musical accompaniment, while touring extensively in Korea and also abroad, for a guest performance at the 2012 Salzburg Festival. Now a mainstay of Tuida's repertory, Hamlet Cantabile celebrated its tenth anniversary in June 2015 and was shown again in September on an open-air stage at the ensemble's basecamp in rural Gangwon Province, where the artists pursue "a life in community through theatre" (Pamphlet 2015). I saw the piece there, as part of a local theater festival that attracted tourists, citizens of the surrounding villages, and soldiers from a nearby military base. www.borrowers.uga.edu/783209/show 3/11 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation

Singing Hamlet (Song Bora) with background dancers: Lee Won-kyoung, Choi Jee-sook, Jo Ella (from left to right); copyright Taroo

The Pansori Hamlet Project took off in 2012 with a series of workshops and showcase performances. In line with their motto "reinvigorating Korean traditional music," the members of Taroo, all trained in pansori, are seeking a middle-ground between tradition and contemporaneity, a philosophy that also motivated this production. In a first attempt, they tackled the problem of creating a Hamlet for today by literally time-warping the Danish Prince onto a basement stage, where they questioned his decisions and re-staged key scenes. In a second experiment they confronted the Western classic with radically personal perspectives drawn from their own life in Seoul. This meandering path between historical weight and reconsiderations of the play in light of the everyday lead to the final piece, first presented in 2014 and, slightly modified, again one year later at the Seoul Arts Center, where I saw it for the second time.

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Reading Hamlet's diary: Hwang Hyeran, Choi Jaeyoung, Choi Soojin, Gong Jun (left to right); copyright Tuida

Tuida's Hamlet Cantabile opens with a procession. To a slightly swinging, but otherwise classical melody, four white-faced characters, barefooted, dressed in ragged clothes, and wearing tight hats like bathing caps but with little twigs attached and the ears sticking out, drag along a handcart filled with a variety of small objects, soon followed by a bigger hay wagon with even more "stuff." They set up their camp and, after finding the diary of dead prince Hamlet in one of their boxes, begin a ritual for his restless soul. What starts as a simple re-enactment of the well-known plot, soon turns into a wild spectacle with elaborate masks and puppets, solo and ensemble songs and dances. Often one actor, immersed in the prince's memories, becomes "possessed" and adopts the role of one of the characters as if in trance, only withheld by long ribbons that the others span across the stage. Jokes and chit-chat in-between these intense scenes structure the performance that loosely follows Shakespeare's play.

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For in that sleep of death which dreams may come: Lee Won-kyoung (front), Choi Jee-sook (back); copyright Taroo

In contrast, the Pansori Hamlet Project begins in pitch dark. As the light slowly dims up, I become aware of some figures huddled together in a large wooden construction that resembles a climbing scaffold. The four women — three regular pansori-singers of Taroo and one guest performer trained in stage acting, a member of the theater company Gorae, as the Pamphlet informs us — all wear identical black costumes with cape, ruff, and pageboy-style wig. Obviously, these four "Hamlets" are waiting for the ghost of their father and promptly get scared to death by each other. Then, in broad light, they gather and explain the situation to each other and the audience. They are in Denmark, North of Germany, South of Scandinavia, "like Korea a peninsula." Their increasingly heated debate about the play's premises is cut short, however. Gong beats from afar, played by a single musician who handles various percussion instruments and a computer, initiate the ghost's next visit. With spoken dialogue, free discussion, and numerous stand-alone songs, some in the characteristic hoarse pansori-voice, others more like numbers in a musical, the plot unfolds at a fast pace.

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Conjuring Hamlet: Choi Jaeyoung, Choi Soojin, Hwang Hyeran, Gong Jun (left to right); copyright Tuida These two "meta-Hamlets" are strikingly similar in the visual uniformity of the performers. Their costumes render age and gender ambiguous and without any further means of identification their individual identities at first seem rather insignificant. But in their idiosyncratic acting the four performers of Tuida — only referred to as gwangdae ("clowns") in the pamphlet — soon turn out quite distinct types, simple but likeable, comparable to the stock characters in commedia dell'arte: One acts overwhelmingly considerate while another gleams of mischief, and a third repeatedly calls the others to order. It is a troupe of underdogs whose individuality does not count for much but who, each one in his or her own way, adds to the collectively staged ritual. The four "Hamlets" of Taroo, despite their recognizably different voices, appear much more interchangeable. Typical for pansori narratives, each of them is flexible in representing a variety of different aspects of Hamlet and his surroundings, talking both about and as him.

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Claudius praying; copyright Tuida

Both pieces share another distinct characteristic of pansori and other traditional arts, namely a loose, episodic structure that alternates between intense singing, dancing, and acting on the one hand, more reflective and discursive scenes of casual dialogue on the other. How the performers make use of space and objects, though, could not be more different. Hamlet Cantabile takes place on an empty stage, where the actors set up small ad-hoc structures as needed, such as an altar-like table or a puppet-stage erected on the hay wagon for the mousetrap-play. The clowns handle their beautiful props, some of them still dating from the premiere, with great care and affection, suggesting an intimacy that is usually reserved for heirlooms passed from one generation to the next. Finding peace for Hamlet's restless soul

www.borrowers.uga.edu/783209/show 8/11 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation becomes a task that every generation needs to tackle again and again, with vintage objects from the attic serving as memorabilia.

Four Hamlets in search of their drama: Song Bora (left), Lee Won-kyoung (middle), Jo Ella (upstairs), Choi Jee-sook (right); copyright Taroo Different both in form and function, the elaborately crafted stage design of Taroo's Pansori Hamlet Project resembles a miniature (or oversize?) timber castle with holes, passages, trapdoors, and fences. The performers use the whole construction as their playground, moving here and there, climbing up and down, their heads popping up in unexpected places. As pansori storytellers, the performers are not dependent on props (although they use some on occasion) and even abandon the iconic fan. The books and musical instruments that fill the niches of their wooden fortress rarely serve scenic purposes but rather represent a dusty and estranged past. The Hamlet brought to life by the performers' show and tell is trapped in a labyrinth, which might just be in his head, but somehow has materialized on stage. It is only in the end that the four Hamlets leave this haunted house behind, take of their masquerade (ironically all revealing long white gowns, just another uniform), and walk away, through the middle row towards the back door of the theater.

Hamlet Cantabile ends on a slightly different note, at least in the version I saw. Unable to break the curse of repetition, but far from giving up, the clowns gather their goods, pack up their carts, and leave for the road. With some metaphysical solace in their baggage, as death is just another beginning, their tour will continue and the next gig might be just around the corner or somewhere on the other side of the globe. Wherever, whenever, these actors will bring the puppets of Hamlet and his extended royal family back to life with their enchanting songs, if only for a short while. I wonder, though, if the premise of Tuida's Hamlet Cantabile — eternal return — has become a self- fulfilling prophecy, given the continuing success of the play. This might explain why the performance I saw suffered a bit from a routine that seems to have crept into the quirky hustle and bustle between the incantations.

www.borrowers.uga.edu/783209/show 9/11 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation However, the ecstatic play, the beautiful masks, and the music, at times mellow and dripping, then shrill and piercing, makes up for this little letdown.

Playing theatre: Choi Jee-sook (left) and Song Bora (right); copyright Taroo

Taroo's Pansori Hamlet Project, which hopefully keeps on its fruitful process of development, does not suffer from an overdose of ritualistic pathos, thanks to scenes of mutual self-ascertainment and interpretation that contrast with the stylized voices and gestures of pansori. However, the way the performers speak in these scenes seems undecided between rhetorical stage acting and hectic casual talk. A more conversational attitude, as explored in the preparatory showcases, might help to find fitting voices for a Hamlet of our times. Nevertheless, by integrating their debate into the play, sometimes a bit pedagogical, often outright hilarious, they render the absent (or overly present) prince a bit more into our contemporary.

Both productions succeed in offering new, accessible perspectives on an old yet inexhaustible play by juggling with traditional culture and more recent worldviews. Tuida's Hamlet Cantabile tends towards the poetic and esoteric side, Taroo's Pansori Hamlet Project more towards a critical contemporary stance. Rather than mining Shakespeare's text for hidden meanings, Tuida and Taroo present different ways of describing, debating, and re-imagining Hamlet, both the play and the character — loud and passionate, then again detached, ironic, even annoyed, raw or subtle, critical or compassionate, but always with a keen interest in details and open questions.

REFERENCES

www.borrowers.uga.edu/783209/show 10/11 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation Gangwon Munhwa Jaedan (Gangwon Art & Culture Foundation). 2015. Gangwon-in, Salm-irang, Yesul-irang (People of Gangwon Province, Life and Art). Festival pamphlet (including "Hamlet Cantabile"). Gugak Myujikeol Jipdan Taru (Gugak Musical Collective Taroo). 2015. Pansori Hamlet Project. Performance pamphlet. Im, Yeeyon. 2008. "The Location of Shakespeare in Korea: Lee Yountaek's Hamlet and the Mirage of Interculturality." Theatre Journal 60: 257-76. Kim, Jong-hwan. 1995. "Shakespeare in a Korean Cultural Context." Asian Theatre Journal 12.1: 37-49. Lee Hyon-u. 2011. "Shamanism in Korean Hamlets since 1990: Exorcising Han." Asian Theatre Journal 28.1: 104-28. Lee, Hyunjung. 2015. "Conceptualizing Korean Shakespeare in the Era of Globalization." In Performing the Nation in Global Korea: Transnational Theatre. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 93-126.

PERMISSIONS On behalf of Ensemble Taroo, I permit the use of the [included] promotion images of "Pansori Hamlet Project" in the context of a performance review by Jan Creutzenberg, to be published in the journal Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation (http://www.borrowers.uga.edu (http://www.borrowers.uga.edu)).

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www.borrowers.uga.edu/783209/show 11/11 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation

Contributors

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Maurizio Calbi is Professor of English at the University of Salerno (Italy). He has (/previous)published on Shakespeare, the representations of the body in early modern culture, postcolonial literature, and postcolonial rewriting of Shakespeare. His most recent book is Spectral Shakespeares: Media Adaptations in the Twenty-First (/about) Century (Palgrave 2013; paperback 2016). He is currently working on Shakespeare in the French nouvelle vague, and preparing a monograph on "interstitial Shakespeare," which uses examples of adaptations in different media to address (/archive) current debates about the notion of "global Shakespeare."

Jan Creutzenberg has studied theater at Freie Universität Berlin, where he is currently pursuing a Ph.D. about "Community in Contemporary Pansori Performances," while living in Seoul. He has published and presented on traditional performing arts, as well as on Brecht and Shakespeare in Korea, and contributed to the Routledge Handbook of Asian Theatre. He writes about his research and other "performative" experiences on his blog seoulstages.wordpress.com (http://seoulstages.wordpress.com).

Christy Desmet is Josiah Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Georgia. The author of Reading Shakespeare's Characters: Reading, Ethics, and Identity (Massachusetts 1992), she is also editor of Shakespeare and Appropriation (with Robert Sawyer, Routledge 1999), Harold Bloom's Shakespeare (with Robert Sawyer, Palgrave 2001), Shakespearean Gothic (with Anne Williams, Wales 2009), and Helen Faucit (Pickering and Chatto 2011). With Sujata Iyengar, she founded and co-edits Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation.

Shawn DeSouza-Coelho is a writer, theater theorist/practitioner, and professional magician based in Toronto, Ontario. He recently completed his M.A. (English, Experimental Digital Media) at the University of Waterloo, exploring the intersections between narrative theory and the act of play in videogames. His book, Metamagic: An Introduction, released in 2013, explores the art of conjuring magic as a medium for discourse. Shawn is currently working on his next book: the authorized biography of retired stage manager Nora Polley.

Kyle DiRoberto is an Assistant Professor and director of the outreach program in English for the University of Arizona, South Campus. The title of her dissertation is "Grotesque Transformations and the Discourse of Conversion in Robert Greene's Work and Shakespeare's Falstaff." She has contributed two www.borrowers.uga.edu/783183/show 1/4 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation chapters to volumes of medieval and early modern scholarship: "Representations of the Plowman and the Prostitute in Puritan and Anti-Puritan Satire: Or the Rhetoric of Plainness and the Reformation of the Popular in the Harvey Nashe Quarrel," in Rural Space in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age: The Spatial Turn in Premodern Studies (De Gruyter 2012) and "Sacred Parody in Robert Green's Groatsworth of Wit", in Laughter in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times: Epistemology of a Fundamental Human Behavior, Its Meaning, and Consequences (De Gruyter 2010).

Valerie Fazel, Ph.D. is an Instructor in Arizona State University's Writing Programs and Honors Faculty at Barrett, the Honors College at ASU. Her research focus is on Shakespeare performance adaptation, digital media appropriation, and Internet research methods. Her recent work on Shakespeare fan fiction (co-authored with Louise Geddes) was published August 2015 in Shakespeare. She has a forthcoming chapter (co-authored with Ayanna Thompson) in the Norton Critical Edition of Much Ado About Nothing. She is currently co-editing (with Louise Geddes) an essay collection for Palgrave titled The Shakespeare User: Adaptation and Appropriation in the 21st Century.

Kirk Hendershott-Kraetzer is Professor of Humanities and Co-Director of the Global Citizen Honors Program at Olivet College, where he teaches Shakespeare, film, creative writing, composition and rhetoric, and literature. His longstanding research interest is performances of Shakespearean texts in film and television, with more recent forays into the construction of knowledge and identity and into representations of Shakespeare in social media.

Kylie Jarrett is Lecturer in Multimedia in the Department of Media Studies at the National University of Ireland Maynooth. Her research focus is the political economy of the commercial Web and she is author of Feminism, Labour and Digital Media: The Digital Housewife (Routledge 2016).

Toby Malone is a post-doctoral fellow and instructor in the University of Waterloo's Theatre and Performance unit in the Department of Drama and Speech Communication. His research interests lie in practical dramaturgy, textual performance historiography, digital humanities, adaptation studies, and Shakespearean performance. He has published articles in Shakespeare Survey, Literature-Film Quarterly, The Routledge Companion to Dramaturgy, and Canadian Theatre Review, and has several chapters in forthcoming collections. His first book, Adapting 'War Horse': Cognition, the Spectator, and a Sense of Play will be released by Palgrave Macmillan in early 2016.

Jeneen Naji is Digital Media faculty in the Department of Media Studies at National University of Ireland Maynooth. Dr. Naji's research is in the area of digital culture, specifically exploring the impact of the digital apparatus on poetic expression. She is also a member of the editorial review board of the International Journal of Game-Based Learning and a Fulbright Scholar.

Stephen O'Neill is Lecturer in the Department of English at the National University of Ireland Maynooth. His research focuses on Shakespearean drama and adaptation, especially in new media. He is the author of Shakespeare and www.borrowers.uga.edu/783183/show 2/4 11/19/2019 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation YouTube: New Media Forms of the Bard (Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare 2014), Staging Ireland: Representations in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama (Four Courts 2007); and essays in Celtic Shakespeare: The Bard and his Borderers (Ashgate 2013), The Shakespearean International Yearbook (Ashgate 2014), and Borrowers and Lenders (http://www.borrowers.uga.edu/1281/show (http://www.borrowers.uga.edu/1281/show)). He is editor of Shakespeare and the Irish Writer (UCD Press 2012). His is currently working on Shakespeare memes and on editing Broadcast Your Shakespeare, a forthcoming essay collection in the Arden Shakespeare series.

Jennifer Roberts-Smith is Associate Professor and Associate Chair of Theatre and Performance at the University of Waterloo. Her research and creative practice focus on Shakespeare's language, Elizabethan performance techniques, inter- medial theater, and experience design in the digital humanities. Jennifer is Principal Investigator of two multi-institutional research projects, the Simulated Environment for Theatre (SET) and the Stratford Festival Online: Games and Virtual Learning Environments for Education and Audience Engagement. She is also co-leader of the Interface cluster of the Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) research project.

Lisa S. Starks-Estes (formerly Lisa S. Starks) is Associate Professor of English at University of South Florida St. Petersburg, where she chairs the Department of Verbal and Visual Arts and directs the MLA in Liberal Studies Program. She has published articles, edited special issues of journals, and co-edited book collections on sexuality and violence in Renaissance drama, Shakespeare on screen, and other topics, including chapters in Staging the Blazon in Early Modern English Theater (Ashgate 2013) and Violent Masculinities: Male Aggression in Early Modern Texts and Culture (Palgrave 2013). Most recently, she has published a scholarly monograph, entitled Violence, Trauma, and Virtus in Shakespeare's Roman Poems and Plays: Transforming Ovid (Palgrave 2014). She is currently working on a new project on the ways in which Shakespeare and other early modern writers appropriated Ovid to conceptualize theatrical practices and experiences.

Geoffrey Way recently earned his Ph.D. in Literature from Arizona State University, and is currently an Instructor of English at ASU. His dissertation "Digital Shakespeares and the Performance of Relevance" explores the ways that Shakespearean theaters and festivals incorporate digital media into their marketing and performance practices.

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