#Bard: "And noble offices thou mayst effect of mediation"

Only seven years have passed since Katherine Rowe guest edited a ground-breaking special issue of Shakespeare Quarterly addressed to new media (volume 61, issue 3 [2010]).¹ Yet within that short time, the new media environment in which Shakespeare productions and Shakespeare scholarship now exist has changed with astonishing speed. To name just a few of those changes: the explosive proliferation of new platforms for cultural production (Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, Vine); the growth of new media genres (the blog, the vlog, the meme, the web series); the new pervasiveness of social mediatization, accompanied by development of new models for monetizing social media platforms; the use of crowd-sourcing as a tool for scholarship and capitalization; the coming of age of the graphic novel and the video game as media forms; the mainstreaming of remix culture and corresponding shifts in copyright law in Canada and the United States; the new ubiquity of the long-form broadcast television series, enabled by the phenomena of time-shifted viewing and binge watching. Many of the elements I've isolated here predate the second decade of the twenty-first century, but, taken as a group, they speak to an acceleration of several trends:

1. 1. The influence of social media, with its pressure for users to speed up their patterns of production and consumption, tribalize content, and engage in instant responses, in the process blurring traditional lines between public and private, decentering received models of cultural authority, and focusing attention on the present

2. 2. The appearance of the "same" content across several media platforms at once, with the perception (and concomitant expectation) that content is (and should be) frictionlessly mobile or, as recent commentators have put it, "spreadable"

3. 3. The assertive ascendancy of visual and aural culture, in competition with print culture for audience attention

4. 4. Hybridization of older and newer media, a phenomenon particularly visible in Michael Friedman's example of the "cinemacast" in his essay in this issue

5. 5. Democratization of access to, as well as production and consumption of, media content

6. 6. Simultaneous movement of affective states in two very different directions—at once toward media experiences that reward distracted attention and at the same time toward media experiences that are immersive and participatory.²

This newly emergent, constantly morphing media environment is rapidly reshaping how we experience all manner of content and create knowledge, including that of Shakespeare. Some of those changes are indeed empowering. Access to reliable editions of Shakespeare, high-resolution facsimiles, digital corpora of early modern texts, and exciting new software tools have significantly democratized study of the Shakespeare text, and DVDs, streaming, and YouTube have made available more performances of Shakespeare than ever before in history. There is a case to be made that there's never been a more exciting time to study Shakespeare. However, some of these developments have been less than sanguine for traditional Shakespeare scholarship. In the past several years, a crisis of the humanities has hit English departments especially hard, in part (though certainly not entirely) the result of some erosion of the cultural authority of literature and the printed book precipitated by the rise of new media. And it is not always clear that transposing Shakespeare into new media forms has managed to accommodate the particular kinds of experiences Shakespeare's works afford, nor is it obvious that the drive to ubiquitous contemporization that social mediatization encourages serves Shakespeare especially well. It is thus an opportune time to consider yet again both the affordances and challenges new media presents for Shakespearean production and scholarship, not in some effort to hold it all at bay (not possible) or to embrace new media with open arms (not wise), but to work out the terms of our "divided duty" (Othello, 1.3.208), to quote Desdemona, to our own digital age and to Shakespeare.

This new mediascape has proved particularly disconcerting for old media, faced with the prospect of being demoted, crowded out, or made obsolescent by their media rivals, especially for younger consumers. This prospect has special significance for Shakespeare, since...