Stephen O'Neill | National University of Ireland, Maynooth (original) (raw)
Papers by Stephen O'Neill
Cahiers Élisabéthains: A Journal of English Renaissance Studies, 2021
This article explores the polysemous intertextuality of Westworld, an example of ‘complex televis... more This article explores the polysemous intertextuality of Westworld, an example of ‘complex television’, and focuses particularly on its Shakespearean coordinates. In this futuristic show about sentient androids who quote Shakespeare is a deep web of connections to other Shakespeare adaptations in film, digital cultures, and popular music. Through the perspectives of fan studies and media studies, the article argues that what unfolds out of the show’s discourses and those of its fans, who engage with it through digital platforms and technologies, is a micro media history of Shakespeare. In turn, the show advances an understanding of Shakespeare as posthuman.
Shakespeare , 2021
Maggie O’Farrell’s award-winning novel Hamnet explores the tradition that the death of Shakespear... more Maggie O’Farrell’s award-winning novel Hamnet explores the tradition that the death of Shakespeare’s son inaugurates the father’s play. Reopening Hamlet’s metaphorical grave, the novel brings its reader into the play’s imagined point of origin. It does so, this article argues, less out of an interest in Shakespeare himself or the primacy of father/son dyad than in acts of recovery that take the reader into a network of linked early modern lives. In addition to the extraordinary vitality the novel gives to the young boy, particular focus is placed on Agnes, its imagining of Anne Hathaway. Drawing on the fields of motherhood studies and memory studies, as well as Shakespeare adaptation, I argue that Hamnet creates networks of remembrance that are significantly maternalized. These include Hamlet and an epigraph citing Stephen Greenblatt’s Hamnet essay, as well as memories and stories the Hamlet tradition displaces. Reading the novel through a series of interrelated themes – doubles, memories and ghosts – the article explores how O’Farrell engages with Hamlet as its inherited memory space and announces itself as a novel interested in maternal memories, spaces and stories. As such, the novel provides fascinating insight into how a literary text produces memory and invites us to remember a classic text like Hamlet differently.
Shakespeare and Geek Culture, 2020
Tom Hiddleston is not simply a (Shakespearean) actor or a self-identifying ‘geek’ but a complex f... more Tom Hiddleston is not simply a (Shakespearean) actor or a self-identifying ‘geek’ but a complex fan text, the site of meanings and desires that exceed any individual role he plays. This chapter explores the emerging canon of Hiddleston fanfic that focuses on his Coriolanus for the Donmar Warehouse production, broadcast worldwide as part of NT Live. In texts such as A Change of Honours and Never man sigh’d truer breath, Hiddleston is the cynosure of frequently queer desires. It is these sites of adaptation rather than the Shakespeare text that set the chapter’s interpretative agenda, in the spirit of Douglas Lanier’s field-defining concept of Shakespearean rhizomatics as a methodological approach to how our contemporary Shakespeare(s) are formed. Reading rhizomatically challenges Shakespeare-centrism and the sense of propriety and disciplinary boundaries that continue to ghost Shakespeare criticism’s interventions into vernacular texts and spaces. Fanfic confronts our field with an ethical question around the appropriative dimensions of critical practice – do we risk fetishizing fandom as the newly new authentic Shakespeare(s)? This chapter seeks to enact a criticism alert to a range of interests, media forms and cultural practices so that we might interpret Shakespeare in less anthropocentric terms. Shakespeare(s) becomes through the interaction of a range of agential actors - the fan, the text, the media platform. Fanfic exemplifies this rhizomatic dynamic: Coriolanus becomes fanfic (Coriolanus and Aufidius as the original “slash” pairing?) and fanfic becomes Shakespearean as its online practitioners assert a Bardic function and spin new narratives from older texts. Fanfic further permits the scholar to come out as a ShakesFan, a “geek”, a Hiddleston fan, or crucially all of these, but also to concede to not sharing in fandom’s desire for more of and more from the hypotext. Advancing a non-binary approach to Shakespeare fan texts, this chapter aims to critically examine how Shakespeare and fanfic are deterritorialized and reterritorialized in their mutually dynamic encounters.
Borrowers and Lenders, 2020
Among the literary and artistic responses to the contemporary humanitarian crisis of refuge is Si... more Among the literary and artistic responses to the contemporary humanitarian crisis of refuge is Sir Thomas More, the late Elizabethan play that Shakespeare had a hand in and in which the protagonist offers a powerful articulation of "the strangers' case." It is the modern uses of this speech that this article focuses on, in particular on digital platforms, and as a response to the contemporary refugee crisis and discourses about migrants. Notable uses of the speech include Ian McKellen's recitations and their remediation on Twitter (with the hashtag #strangerscase) and YouTube (McKellen 2010); the Bell Shakespeare Company, who produced a video featuring "new arrivals to Australia" (Change Media 2011); Stephen Greenblatt's inclusion of it to suggest that Shakespeare is a "cure for xenophobia" (Greenblatt 2017); the Shakespeare Association of America (James 2017), which cited More's words in reaction to Trump's travel ban; and a series of events at Shakespeare's Globe to mark international refugee week (@The_Globe 2018). Tracking such examples, the article employs theories of remediation and of media flow to examine critically how the More speech, that itself imagines flows of people, circulates as a digital object online, be it in the form of the tweet hashtag #strangerscase, or a YouTube video. It also makes use of the digital affordances of Borrowers and Lenders, embedding links and samples to construct a digital archive of the speech's remediation and circulation. These iterations draw Shakespeare, long imagined as a type of transnational traveller, into urgent ethical questions about borders, displaced peoples, and responsibility to the Other, as More's empathetic plea comes to function synecdochally for Shakespeare, the "Hand D" of the play's collaborative authorship. The article explores how a dismembered Bard returns through processes of remediation in digital settings, where unseen or nonhuman agents are increasingly constitutive of the thing we call "Shakespeare." The article deliberately avoids rehearsing familiar debates about Shakespeare's cultural value, however, to address instead the challenges and also the possibilities of applying Shakespeare to humanitarian crises. I suggest that the remediated More / Shakespeare constitute spaces where values of empathy, tolerance, and diversity can find articulation.
Literature Compass, 2018
There has been much critical work on the symbolic centrality of Ireland to English Renaissance li... more There has been much critical work on the symbolic centrality of Ireland to English Renaissance literature and drama. To focus on the latter, Shakespeare's histories have been read topically in terms of the contemporaneous Irish wars and also more historically, in terms of English colonialism in Ireland. Topical readings have been followed by allegorical approaches with, for instance, attention to Othello's “ghostly Irish subtext” (Hadfield, 1997) or Troilus and Cressida's memories of Elizabethan conflict in Ireland (Parker, 1996). Such interpretations suggest scholarly imaginativeness, the discovery of surprising meaning about a text we thought we knew, albeit within a Shakespeare-centric frame. They further suggest the capacity of Ireland to enter a play's imaginary—as problem, as image, as other world. At stake here, then, are interrelated questions about what Ireland is doing in English Renaissance drama, where and when we expect to find it, and how we read it. This essay re-examines the question of why and how Ireland features in plays by Shakespeare and other early modern dramatists. This deceptively simple question is intended to revisit some assumptions that underpin current critical understandings. Why Ireland features in plays has been largely understood as a function of historical contexts and processes: critics and scholars have turned to these as an important site of explanation, with the early modern colonialist discourse on Ireland given special prominence as a determinant of meaning. However, this focus has sidelined other considerations. This article argues for a broadening of context, beyond a focus on topical resonance, to allow for a consideration of dramatic genre and form, the imitative nature of dramatic writing, and the theatre companies themselves, as important factors that shaped how a text and context like Ireland and the Irish found its way into a play. This approach treats representations as a series of reciprocal markings, intertextual echoes, and foregrounds the capacity of a play to make meaning within its own frame. The objective here is less about discounting the political and ideological work of Renaissance plays than about exploring their possibilities to (re)imagine the early modern “land of ire.”
Multicultural Shakespeare , 2019
This article considers how Shakespeare's King Lear has become a Brexit play across a range of dis... more This article considers how Shakespeare's King Lear has become a Brexit play across a range of discourses and media, from theatre productions and journalism to social media. With its themes of division and disbursement, of cliff edges and tragic self-immolation, Lear is the Shakespearean play that has been turned to as metaphor and analogy for the UK's decision following the 23 June 2016 referendum to leave the European Union. Reading this presentist application of Shakespeare, the article attends to Shakespeare as itself a discourse through which cultural ideas, both real and imaginary, about Brexit and the EU are negotiated. It asks how can we might remap Lear in this present context-what other meanings and histories are to be derived from the play, especially in Lear's exile and search for refuge, or in Cordelia's departure for and return from France? Moving from a consideration of a Brexit Lear to an archipelagic and even European Lear, this article argues that Shakespeare is simultaneously a site of supranational connections and of a desire for values of empathy and refuge that reverberate with debates about migration in Europe.
Shakespeare Studies, 2018
![Research paper thumbnail of “In fair [Europe], where we lay our scene” Romeo and Juliet, Europe and digital cultures, in Romeo and Juliet in European Culture, ed. by Juan F. Cerdá, Dirk Delabastita, Keith Gregor (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2017), 283-300.](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/61077826/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](This chapter explores several iterations of Romeo and Juliet in (European) digital cultures. Euro... more This chapter explores several iterations of Romeo and Juliet in (European)
digital cultures. Europe is placed in brackets here to capture how, in a digital context, boundaries may and may not apply, but also to complicate critical de- bate surrounding European Shakespeares. To what extent might we encounter
a distinctly European Romeo and Juliet in digital cultures? Our field must think critically about the kind of European narratives, mythographies and values that are mobilised through Shakespeares in Europe. Travel and surfing are deployed as metaphors in order to track Europe’s Romeo and Juliets, with the resulting findings in the digital Wunderkabinett regarded as a function of both human selection and algorithmically determined search. While the focus is primarily on YouTube, what emerges is a deep sense of Romeo and Juliet’s convergence with popular culture, news stories and contemporary discourse about integration within Europe. In digital cultures, the chapter suggests, Romeo and Juliet is a metalanguage for conflict, boundaries and difference.
Building on the media turn within Shakespeare studies, Broadcast Your Shakespeare approaches Shak... more Building on the media turn within Shakespeare studies, Broadcast Your Shakespeare approaches Shakespeare as a series of media stories at once old, new and ongoing. Thematically arranged, the chapters consider a variety of media from television, radio and film to social media networks and look at the continuities between historical and contemporary media representations of Shakespeare. Writing at the intersection of Shakespeare studies and media studies, this book investigates the impact media has upon us as readers, viewers and users of Shakespeare. It also explores fan reactions to Shakespeare through media of their own, from Tumblr fan art to vlogging and Twitter.
“An urgent and lively collection, Broadcast Your Shakespeare operates at the intersection of new technologies and new Shakespeares. Its diverse, sensitive and politically engaged contributions interrogate the value accrued by Shakespeare in creative play and broadcasted identities across a wide range of media, calling for both attention and action.”
Professor Peter Kirwan, University of Nottingham
This chapter argues that as scholars and critics, we have only begun to explore the uses of the Y... more This chapter argues that as scholars and critics, we have only begun to explore the uses of the YouTube Shakespeare world. Use here is understood through recent theorizations of individual user agency in participatory digital cultures. The chapter focuses on one YouTuber, The Geeky Blonde, who has been producing Shakespeare-themed videos since 2010, as a case study for a critical discussion of the kinds of agency possible through vernacular Shakespeare productions. It considers Shakespeare and YouTube as catalysts for an individual self-efficacy and expression but also argues that YouTube’s commercial logic and its algorithmic systems must be included as ineluctable factors of user agency. This dialogic approach reveals how individuals ‘become’ through Shakespeare but also through mediating technologies themselves, as these shape and determine the seemingly stable, sovereign individual user. The chapter thus identifies the challenges and potentialities within humanist and posthumanist perspectives on YouTube Shakespeare.
Recent work oriented towards race in Shakespeare studies has involved calls not just for critical... more Recent work oriented towards race in Shakespeare studies has involved calls not just for critical attention to race as an ever-present, constitutive element of 'Shakespeare' but also for modes of scholarship and criticism that actively promote critical race studies, diversity and inclusivity within the field. The kind of Shakespeare desired by critical discourse within the field is, I argue, already available within popular cultural productions. This article focuses on British hip-hop artist Akala, who has emerged in the United Kingdom as the face of a contemporary, diversified Shakespeare. From his tracks that reference Shakespeare and engage in a battle-rhyme with the Bard to his founding of the Hip-Hop Shakespeare Company, Akala has been presented in the media – and to a lesser extent in Shakespeare criticism – as simultaneously a critic of a traditionally valorized Shakespeare, one associated with high culture and white privilege, and an exponent of a more culturally hybrid, pliable Shakespeare that appeals to a young, multicultural demographic. Exploring Akala’s earlier work, in particular his track ‘Shakespeare’ and accompanying video, and then turning attention to representations of his role in the Shakespeare quatercentenary, this essay argues that Akala has long being negotiating the difficulties that occur with Shakespeare’s cultural capital when race enters the equation. It further argues that in order to enact a responsible and ethical Shakespeare criticism, the critic has to allow for the possibility that Shakespeare’s cultural prestige, as Thompson importantly acknowledges, may prove unconducive to a progressive race politics (2011: 6).
In their introductory essay, Maurizio Calbi and Stephen O'Neill explore the interrelations betwee... more In their introductory essay, Maurizio Calbi and Stephen O'Neill explore the interrelations between social media and Shakespeare(s), providing a theoretical consideration of both categories that ultimately moves toward an argument for their rhizomatic intersections. Shakespeare increasingly "becomes" through social media (in a Deleuzian sense), and indeed, forms of social media are rearticulated through Shakespeare. The essay also guides the reader through this special issue in which the contributors variously map, define, scrutinize, and challenge social media, Shakespeare and their uncanny convergences.
Review of DruidShakespeare (Richard II, Henry IV, Parts I and 2, Henry V), at the Kilkenny Arts F... more Review of DruidShakespeare (Richard II, Henry IV, Parts I and 2, Henry V), at the Kilkenny Arts Festival, 6-15 August 2015. Directed by Gary Hynes. Adaptation by Mark O'Rowe.
Literature Compass, Jun 3, 2015
The field of Shakespeare studies is becoming increasingly interested in the circulation of Shakes... more The field of Shakespeare studies is becoming increasingly interested in the circulation of Shakespeares across social media platforms such as Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook. An emerging body of scholarship offers important insights into the implications of social media and digital technologies for Shakespearean pedagogy and research. This essay provides a review of the literature and suggests some future directions that theorizations of Shakespeare in/as social media might take. This essay encourages Shakespeare studies to interpret social media Shakespeares as an object of critical analysis, as well as understanding it as a teaching tool and research resource, while recognizing that these categories overlap. More specifically, the essay argues that social media Shakespeares denote a complex network of specific platforms, technologies, cultural signifiers, and the agentive human users that make meaning through these. As users share Shakespeare content and connect with it via social media, they are simultaneously shaping Shakespeare’s current formations and being shaped by distinct yet interlinked technologies.
It is no longer possible to think of Ophelia simply as the restricted tragic girl of Hamlet. Rath... more It is no longer possible to think of Ophelia simply as the restricted tragic girl of Hamlet. Rather, she is a recurrent text, image, and even a brand that can be endlessly repurposed and appropriated. Building on recent work on Ophelia as a discourse that names and constitutes the contemporary girl, this essay examines a variety of Ophelia productions on the video-sharing platform YouTube. It identifies particular genres of response and situates them in terms of current debates within girls' studies, as well as media studies. The objective here is to think more precisely about the modes and politics of girls' media uses. What is at stake in the turn — or return — to Ophelia within online culture? To what extent is Ophelia a progressive text? More broadly, does the democratic media-making associated with Web 2.0 signal new, meaningful forms of feminism, or might we dealing with the latest phase of "girl power"? This essay interprets Ophelia videos in terms of a triptych, "YouTube-Shakespeare-Ophelia." Each of these terms should be understood as a frame, both enabling and delimiting, through which girls produce and/or perform postfeminist identities online. Ophelia becomes a meta-language for a set of negotiations about girl culture and the (im)possibility of authentic expression in the contemporary mediascape.
Shakespeare and YouTube, Apr 24, 2014
Cahiers Élisabéthains: A Journal of English Renaissance Studies, 2021
This article explores the polysemous intertextuality of Westworld, an example of ‘complex televis... more This article explores the polysemous intertextuality of Westworld, an example of ‘complex television’, and focuses particularly on its Shakespearean coordinates. In this futuristic show about sentient androids who quote Shakespeare is a deep web of connections to other Shakespeare adaptations in film, digital cultures, and popular music. Through the perspectives of fan studies and media studies, the article argues that what unfolds out of the show’s discourses and those of its fans, who engage with it through digital platforms and technologies, is a micro media history of Shakespeare. In turn, the show advances an understanding of Shakespeare as posthuman.
Shakespeare , 2021
Maggie O’Farrell’s award-winning novel Hamnet explores the tradition that the death of Shakespear... more Maggie O’Farrell’s award-winning novel Hamnet explores the tradition that the death of Shakespeare’s son inaugurates the father’s play. Reopening Hamlet’s metaphorical grave, the novel brings its reader into the play’s imagined point of origin. It does so, this article argues, less out of an interest in Shakespeare himself or the primacy of father/son dyad than in acts of recovery that take the reader into a network of linked early modern lives. In addition to the extraordinary vitality the novel gives to the young boy, particular focus is placed on Agnes, its imagining of Anne Hathaway. Drawing on the fields of motherhood studies and memory studies, as well as Shakespeare adaptation, I argue that Hamnet creates networks of remembrance that are significantly maternalized. These include Hamlet and an epigraph citing Stephen Greenblatt’s Hamnet essay, as well as memories and stories the Hamlet tradition displaces. Reading the novel through a series of interrelated themes – doubles, memories and ghosts – the article explores how O’Farrell engages with Hamlet as its inherited memory space and announces itself as a novel interested in maternal memories, spaces and stories. As such, the novel provides fascinating insight into how a literary text produces memory and invites us to remember a classic text like Hamlet differently.
Shakespeare and Geek Culture, 2020
Tom Hiddleston is not simply a (Shakespearean) actor or a self-identifying ‘geek’ but a complex f... more Tom Hiddleston is not simply a (Shakespearean) actor or a self-identifying ‘geek’ but a complex fan text, the site of meanings and desires that exceed any individual role he plays. This chapter explores the emerging canon of Hiddleston fanfic that focuses on his Coriolanus for the Donmar Warehouse production, broadcast worldwide as part of NT Live. In texts such as A Change of Honours and Never man sigh’d truer breath, Hiddleston is the cynosure of frequently queer desires. It is these sites of adaptation rather than the Shakespeare text that set the chapter’s interpretative agenda, in the spirit of Douglas Lanier’s field-defining concept of Shakespearean rhizomatics as a methodological approach to how our contemporary Shakespeare(s) are formed. Reading rhizomatically challenges Shakespeare-centrism and the sense of propriety and disciplinary boundaries that continue to ghost Shakespeare criticism’s interventions into vernacular texts and spaces. Fanfic confronts our field with an ethical question around the appropriative dimensions of critical practice – do we risk fetishizing fandom as the newly new authentic Shakespeare(s)? This chapter seeks to enact a criticism alert to a range of interests, media forms and cultural practices so that we might interpret Shakespeare in less anthropocentric terms. Shakespeare(s) becomes through the interaction of a range of agential actors - the fan, the text, the media platform. Fanfic exemplifies this rhizomatic dynamic: Coriolanus becomes fanfic (Coriolanus and Aufidius as the original “slash” pairing?) and fanfic becomes Shakespearean as its online practitioners assert a Bardic function and spin new narratives from older texts. Fanfic further permits the scholar to come out as a ShakesFan, a “geek”, a Hiddleston fan, or crucially all of these, but also to concede to not sharing in fandom’s desire for more of and more from the hypotext. Advancing a non-binary approach to Shakespeare fan texts, this chapter aims to critically examine how Shakespeare and fanfic are deterritorialized and reterritorialized in their mutually dynamic encounters.
Borrowers and Lenders, 2020
Among the literary and artistic responses to the contemporary humanitarian crisis of refuge is Si... more Among the literary and artistic responses to the contemporary humanitarian crisis of refuge is Sir Thomas More, the late Elizabethan play that Shakespeare had a hand in and in which the protagonist offers a powerful articulation of "the strangers' case." It is the modern uses of this speech that this article focuses on, in particular on digital platforms, and as a response to the contemporary refugee crisis and discourses about migrants. Notable uses of the speech include Ian McKellen's recitations and their remediation on Twitter (with the hashtag #strangerscase) and YouTube (McKellen 2010); the Bell Shakespeare Company, who produced a video featuring "new arrivals to Australia" (Change Media 2011); Stephen Greenblatt's inclusion of it to suggest that Shakespeare is a "cure for xenophobia" (Greenblatt 2017); the Shakespeare Association of America (James 2017), which cited More's words in reaction to Trump's travel ban; and a series of events at Shakespeare's Globe to mark international refugee week (@The_Globe 2018). Tracking such examples, the article employs theories of remediation and of media flow to examine critically how the More speech, that itself imagines flows of people, circulates as a digital object online, be it in the form of the tweet hashtag #strangerscase, or a YouTube video. It also makes use of the digital affordances of Borrowers and Lenders, embedding links and samples to construct a digital archive of the speech's remediation and circulation. These iterations draw Shakespeare, long imagined as a type of transnational traveller, into urgent ethical questions about borders, displaced peoples, and responsibility to the Other, as More's empathetic plea comes to function synecdochally for Shakespeare, the "Hand D" of the play's collaborative authorship. The article explores how a dismembered Bard returns through processes of remediation in digital settings, where unseen or nonhuman agents are increasingly constitutive of the thing we call "Shakespeare." The article deliberately avoids rehearsing familiar debates about Shakespeare's cultural value, however, to address instead the challenges and also the possibilities of applying Shakespeare to humanitarian crises. I suggest that the remediated More / Shakespeare constitute spaces where values of empathy, tolerance, and diversity can find articulation.
Literature Compass, 2018
There has been much critical work on the symbolic centrality of Ireland to English Renaissance li... more There has been much critical work on the symbolic centrality of Ireland to English Renaissance literature and drama. To focus on the latter, Shakespeare's histories have been read topically in terms of the contemporaneous Irish wars and also more historically, in terms of English colonialism in Ireland. Topical readings have been followed by allegorical approaches with, for instance, attention to Othello's “ghostly Irish subtext” (Hadfield, 1997) or Troilus and Cressida's memories of Elizabethan conflict in Ireland (Parker, 1996). Such interpretations suggest scholarly imaginativeness, the discovery of surprising meaning about a text we thought we knew, albeit within a Shakespeare-centric frame. They further suggest the capacity of Ireland to enter a play's imaginary—as problem, as image, as other world. At stake here, then, are interrelated questions about what Ireland is doing in English Renaissance drama, where and when we expect to find it, and how we read it. This essay re-examines the question of why and how Ireland features in plays by Shakespeare and other early modern dramatists. This deceptively simple question is intended to revisit some assumptions that underpin current critical understandings. Why Ireland features in plays has been largely understood as a function of historical contexts and processes: critics and scholars have turned to these as an important site of explanation, with the early modern colonialist discourse on Ireland given special prominence as a determinant of meaning. However, this focus has sidelined other considerations. This article argues for a broadening of context, beyond a focus on topical resonance, to allow for a consideration of dramatic genre and form, the imitative nature of dramatic writing, and the theatre companies themselves, as important factors that shaped how a text and context like Ireland and the Irish found its way into a play. This approach treats representations as a series of reciprocal markings, intertextual echoes, and foregrounds the capacity of a play to make meaning within its own frame. The objective here is less about discounting the political and ideological work of Renaissance plays than about exploring their possibilities to (re)imagine the early modern “land of ire.”
Multicultural Shakespeare , 2019
This article considers how Shakespeare's King Lear has become a Brexit play across a range of dis... more This article considers how Shakespeare's King Lear has become a Brexit play across a range of discourses and media, from theatre productions and journalism to social media. With its themes of division and disbursement, of cliff edges and tragic self-immolation, Lear is the Shakespearean play that has been turned to as metaphor and analogy for the UK's decision following the 23 June 2016 referendum to leave the European Union. Reading this presentist application of Shakespeare, the article attends to Shakespeare as itself a discourse through which cultural ideas, both real and imaginary, about Brexit and the EU are negotiated. It asks how can we might remap Lear in this present context-what other meanings and histories are to be derived from the play, especially in Lear's exile and search for refuge, or in Cordelia's departure for and return from France? Moving from a consideration of a Brexit Lear to an archipelagic and even European Lear, this article argues that Shakespeare is simultaneously a site of supranational connections and of a desire for values of empathy and refuge that reverberate with debates about migration in Europe.
Shakespeare Studies, 2018
This chapter explores several iterations of Romeo and Juliet in (European) digital cultures. Euro... more This chapter explores several iterations of Romeo and Juliet in (European)
digital cultures. Europe is placed in brackets here to capture how, in a digital context, boundaries may and may not apply, but also to complicate critical de- bate surrounding European Shakespeares. To what extent might we encounter
a distinctly European Romeo and Juliet in digital cultures? Our field must think critically about the kind of European narratives, mythographies and values that are mobilised through Shakespeares in Europe. Travel and surfing are deployed as metaphors in order to track Europe’s Romeo and Juliets, with the resulting findings in the digital Wunderkabinett regarded as a function of both human selection and algorithmically determined search. While the focus is primarily on YouTube, what emerges is a deep sense of Romeo and Juliet’s convergence with popular culture, news stories and contemporary discourse about integration within Europe. In digital cultures, the chapter suggests, Romeo and Juliet is a metalanguage for conflict, boundaries and difference.
Building on the media turn within Shakespeare studies, Broadcast Your Shakespeare approaches Shak... more Building on the media turn within Shakespeare studies, Broadcast Your Shakespeare approaches Shakespeare as a series of media stories at once old, new and ongoing. Thematically arranged, the chapters consider a variety of media from television, radio and film to social media networks and look at the continuities between historical and contemporary media representations of Shakespeare. Writing at the intersection of Shakespeare studies and media studies, this book investigates the impact media has upon us as readers, viewers and users of Shakespeare. It also explores fan reactions to Shakespeare through media of their own, from Tumblr fan art to vlogging and Twitter.
“An urgent and lively collection, Broadcast Your Shakespeare operates at the intersection of new technologies and new Shakespeares. Its diverse, sensitive and politically engaged contributions interrogate the value accrued by Shakespeare in creative play and broadcasted identities across a wide range of media, calling for both attention and action.”
Professor Peter Kirwan, University of Nottingham
This chapter argues that as scholars and critics, we have only begun to explore the uses of the Y... more This chapter argues that as scholars and critics, we have only begun to explore the uses of the YouTube Shakespeare world. Use here is understood through recent theorizations of individual user agency in participatory digital cultures. The chapter focuses on one YouTuber, The Geeky Blonde, who has been producing Shakespeare-themed videos since 2010, as a case study for a critical discussion of the kinds of agency possible through vernacular Shakespeare productions. It considers Shakespeare and YouTube as catalysts for an individual self-efficacy and expression but also argues that YouTube’s commercial logic and its algorithmic systems must be included as ineluctable factors of user agency. This dialogic approach reveals how individuals ‘become’ through Shakespeare but also through mediating technologies themselves, as these shape and determine the seemingly stable, sovereign individual user. The chapter thus identifies the challenges and potentialities within humanist and posthumanist perspectives on YouTube Shakespeare.
Recent work oriented towards race in Shakespeare studies has involved calls not just for critical... more Recent work oriented towards race in Shakespeare studies has involved calls not just for critical attention to race as an ever-present, constitutive element of 'Shakespeare' but also for modes of scholarship and criticism that actively promote critical race studies, diversity and inclusivity within the field. The kind of Shakespeare desired by critical discourse within the field is, I argue, already available within popular cultural productions. This article focuses on British hip-hop artist Akala, who has emerged in the United Kingdom as the face of a contemporary, diversified Shakespeare. From his tracks that reference Shakespeare and engage in a battle-rhyme with the Bard to his founding of the Hip-Hop Shakespeare Company, Akala has been presented in the media – and to a lesser extent in Shakespeare criticism – as simultaneously a critic of a traditionally valorized Shakespeare, one associated with high culture and white privilege, and an exponent of a more culturally hybrid, pliable Shakespeare that appeals to a young, multicultural demographic. Exploring Akala’s earlier work, in particular his track ‘Shakespeare’ and accompanying video, and then turning attention to representations of his role in the Shakespeare quatercentenary, this essay argues that Akala has long being negotiating the difficulties that occur with Shakespeare’s cultural capital when race enters the equation. It further argues that in order to enact a responsible and ethical Shakespeare criticism, the critic has to allow for the possibility that Shakespeare’s cultural prestige, as Thompson importantly acknowledges, may prove unconducive to a progressive race politics (2011: 6).
In their introductory essay, Maurizio Calbi and Stephen O'Neill explore the interrelations betwee... more In their introductory essay, Maurizio Calbi and Stephen O'Neill explore the interrelations between social media and Shakespeare(s), providing a theoretical consideration of both categories that ultimately moves toward an argument for their rhizomatic intersections. Shakespeare increasingly "becomes" through social media (in a Deleuzian sense), and indeed, forms of social media are rearticulated through Shakespeare. The essay also guides the reader through this special issue in which the contributors variously map, define, scrutinize, and challenge social media, Shakespeare and their uncanny convergences.
Review of DruidShakespeare (Richard II, Henry IV, Parts I and 2, Henry V), at the Kilkenny Arts F... more Review of DruidShakespeare (Richard II, Henry IV, Parts I and 2, Henry V), at the Kilkenny Arts Festival, 6-15 August 2015. Directed by Gary Hynes. Adaptation by Mark O'Rowe.
Literature Compass, Jun 3, 2015
The field of Shakespeare studies is becoming increasingly interested in the circulation of Shakes... more The field of Shakespeare studies is becoming increasingly interested in the circulation of Shakespeares across social media platforms such as Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook. An emerging body of scholarship offers important insights into the implications of social media and digital technologies for Shakespearean pedagogy and research. This essay provides a review of the literature and suggests some future directions that theorizations of Shakespeare in/as social media might take. This essay encourages Shakespeare studies to interpret social media Shakespeares as an object of critical analysis, as well as understanding it as a teaching tool and research resource, while recognizing that these categories overlap. More specifically, the essay argues that social media Shakespeares denote a complex network of specific platforms, technologies, cultural signifiers, and the agentive human users that make meaning through these. As users share Shakespeare content and connect with it via social media, they are simultaneously shaping Shakespeare’s current formations and being shaped by distinct yet interlinked technologies.
It is no longer possible to think of Ophelia simply as the restricted tragic girl of Hamlet. Rath... more It is no longer possible to think of Ophelia simply as the restricted tragic girl of Hamlet. Rather, she is a recurrent text, image, and even a brand that can be endlessly repurposed and appropriated. Building on recent work on Ophelia as a discourse that names and constitutes the contemporary girl, this essay examines a variety of Ophelia productions on the video-sharing platform YouTube. It identifies particular genres of response and situates them in terms of current debates within girls' studies, as well as media studies. The objective here is to think more precisely about the modes and politics of girls' media uses. What is at stake in the turn — or return — to Ophelia within online culture? To what extent is Ophelia a progressive text? More broadly, does the democratic media-making associated with Web 2.0 signal new, meaningful forms of feminism, or might we dealing with the latest phase of "girl power"? This essay interprets Ophelia videos in terms of a triptych, "YouTube-Shakespeare-Ophelia." Each of these terms should be understood as a frame, both enabling and delimiting, through which girls produce and/or perform postfeminist identities online. Ophelia becomes a meta-language for a set of negotiations about girl culture and the (im)possibility of authentic expression in the contemporary mediascape.
Shakespeare and YouTube, Apr 24, 2014