Shakespeare and the Digital World: Redefining Scholarship and Practice ed. by Christie Carson, Peter Kirwan (review)

Shakespeare’s relationship to digital technologies and new media is the subject of a growing number of research articles and chapters, journal special issues, and, more recently, scholarly monographs. In addition to representing the first book of essays dedicated to this aspect of Shakespeare studies, Shakespeare and the Digital World offers a timely and thoughtful contribution to scholarship in a rapidly evolving field. The collection is split into four parts, each introduced separately, with an interlude and a concluding editorial chapter. Part 1 concerns Shakespeare research in the digital age; part 2 addresses pedagogy; part 3 turns to digital publishing and academic identity; and part 4 examines issues of communication, public engagement, and performance. Space does not permit detailed analysis of all the book’s chapters, so I have selected particular standout chapters from each section for comment.

Essays in part 1 consider the longue durée of Shakespeare studies in the wider context of digital humanities (John Lavagnino), the phenomenology of archival research in the age of the digital facsimile (Bruce R. Smith), and the iPad’s tactile and immersive intervention in research practice (Farah Karim-Cooper). David McInnis’s chapter offers a critical discussion of the rationale for adopting a wiki format for the Lost Plays Database, a forum for scholarship on lost plays in England between 1570 and 1642. For McInnis (who serves as an editor of the project with Roslyn L. Knutson and Matthew Steggle), the Lost Plays Database is “about the creation of scholarship as much as the dissemination of scholarship,” providing both “the tools and the canvas” (46). But the adoption of a wiki format is not enough: “Online collaboration needs to be more than just a group exercise in indexing or a compilation of the best of current knowledge. . . . Encouraging new and easy ways of interacting with other scholars is essential if the sum is to be greater than its parts” (52).

All of the essays in part 2 situate “the digital” as a medium for pedagogy, not a philosophy or ethos, whether they explore digital learning methods as a supplement to and surrogate for local pedagogical experiences (Erin Sullivan), the mobilization of new media resources to develop a global pedagogy (Sarah Grandage and Julie Sanders), or the use of digital videoconferencing to enable transatlantic collaboration in the Shakespeare classroom (Sheila T. Cavanagh and Kevin A. Quarmby). Peter Kirwan’s Bardathon is the jewel in the crown of Shakespeare performance review blogs, so it is fitting that his chapter in this section champions blogging “as a means of enabling self-reflection, critical awareness and intellectual independence among students” (102). Though the exercise is fraught with the difficulty of “maintaining the expectation of a certain level of sophistication in writing” and addressing the tricky issue of “ownership of the blog medium” (104), blogging encourages students to “build confidence in their own opinions, experience and modes of expression” (105). Blogs and other social media provide a familiar outlet and format “in which many students are [already] writing independently, writing often and writing passionately,” and Kirwan is right to stress the profession’s need to “give serious consideration to the consequences of stifling” such activities (102).

“All’s Well That Ends Orwell,” Sharon O’Dair’s “Half-time” reflective piece, questions the value of “continuing down this path of scientization,” arguing that “embracing the literary, embracing art, embracing writing as a craft, even as an art” offers “resistance to neoliberalism and the digital” (123, 124). For O’Dair, institutional and technological pressures already threaten English studies with a dystopian future in which “algorithms affect even the production of literature . . . accelerate a mathematization or a (social)-scientization of literary scholarship, of critical method” and a “de-verbalization of our pedagogy” (122). The palette O’Dair uses to paint neoliberalism and the digital as the specter haunting English studies is...