Shakespeare Processing: Fragments from a History

If Shakespeare had been able to write his plays using an early floppy disk format, his work could have perished alongside the equipment to read it.

—Lynne Brindley, quoted in IBM Press Release, 2000

[A] 3-1/2-inch disk … could handle 1.44 megabytes of data—that’s about enough for a three-minute song, or 11 copies of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth.

—“R. I. P. Floppy Disk,” BBC News, 2003

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What kind of media phenomenon is “Shakespeare”? If there is one consensus in the burgeoning scholarship on Shakespeare and media, it is that Shakespeare is a ubiquitous media phenomenon, at least in English. Following Lawrence Levine’s classic Highbrow/Lowbrow, we could note that his ubiquity is a result of a combination of factors: the prestige conferred by Shakespeare’s writings on their users, institutional investments in circulating Shakespeare’s work and making it familiar to new audiences, and perhaps the work that Shakespeare’s texts do in stitching together a sense of cultural continuity (whether real or imagined) between his time and ours.¹ Such answers come from a reception history, and we could extend them to media: users and makers of new media confer prestige on their devices by using them to refer to Shakespeare. But such an answer does not necessarily help explain the work Shakespeare materials do inside media, especially at key moments when media technologies emerge or transform. Consider the epigraphs above. How is Shakespeare or Macbeth being used as a measure of durability or storage capacity of digital media? If Shakespeare bestows cultural authority upon his users, how and why do media—which are supposed to just work according to the laws of physics, physiology, and psychology, as one branch of media theory would have it—marshal him as a reliable assistant at key moments of their emergence?

Shakespeare has always existed between forms: a playwright whose work is celebrated as literature, a cultural icon who has stood in for almost every imaginable value, a figure treated as a celebrity and genius, a stand-in for high culture and legitimacy at large, a standin for low culture and popular aesthetics, a name that ties together vast library collections of humanistic treasures, an instructional tool, a set of memorized lines, a collection of quotations, and a common cultural base for a wide swath of elites, not only in the Anglophone world, but in the German-speaking and French-speaking worlds and elsewhere.² As Michael Witmore said to me while we turned the pages of a Folger Library first folio, had Shakespeare written his plays 78–80 years earlier, they would likely be unavailable to us today. Print binding, publication, and circulation technologies emerged as his work was gaining popularity. As Zachary Lesser and Peter Stallybrass argue, the publication of the 1st Hamlet quarto did a lot of work to consecrate itself as literature by bedecking it with scholarly annotation: “[S]ententiae or commonplaces that are pointed out to the reader, either by commas or inverted commas at the beginning of each line or by a change in font.”³ And without an active archival and publishing practice in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Shakespeare would never have achieved his current status as Shakespeare.⁴ True or not, de Toqueville’s famous line that “there is hardly a pioneer’s hut that does not contain a few odd volumes of Shakespeare” is a testament to the state of the publishing industry as much as anything else.⁵ The ubiquity of Shakespeare, and the work’s status as a secular text (in contrast to that other most-possessed book in de Toqueville’s nineteenth-century America, the Bible) is an important prior condition to the story I tell below.

But beyond the print history with which he is usually associated, Shakespeare is also ubiquitous in media history, and here the story begins to change a little. During the nineteenth century, his rise in popularity coincided with the emergence of technical media. Friedrich Kittler uses the term “technical media” or “technological media” to distinguish media technologies like photography, film, and sound recording from...