Broadcast Your Shakespeare: Continuity and Change across Media ed. by Stephen O'Neill (review)

The recent self-reflective turn in Shakespeare studies has renewed questions about how Shakespeare and Shakespeareans can contribute to the larger socio-political environment. The question of Shakespeare's continued relevance is at the forefront of Broadcast Your Shakespeare. Stephen O'Neill's collection makes use of a wide range of historical perspectives to generate new inquiries about how we might expand our understanding of the history of Shakespeare remediations in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The book is an expansive, wide-ranging assessment of what it means to broadcast Shakespeare. With essays drawn together by "the pursuit of a solidarity" (255), the collection recognizes the materialist impetus that activates Shakespeare in service of new technological and ideological movements. Read individually, the essays isolate moments in which Shakespeare exists in a mutually exploitative relationship with the newest accessible media, and present a series of mini-histories covering such diverse topics as Tom Hiddleston's movie and online career, the MIT Global Shakespeares project, and the phonograph's popularity as a pedagogical tool. When placed in conversation with one another, however, these essays build a complex network that draws attention to how Shakespeare is used to serve various economic, cultural, and personal agendas. Courtney Lehmann's afterword makes explicit the call to action that underpins the book when she proposes that the reader consider "what forms of resistance are possible when new and old media converge against the backdrop of participatory culture" (248). Lehmann's deliberate shift away from Shakespeare at the close of the book identifies the individual as the driving force of Shakespearean broadcast and solicits a deeper consideration of our role as participants in a Shakespeare circulated through technologies both new and old.

As the introduction makes clear, Shakespeare-as-historical-process is not a phenomenon that occurs in a vacuum, and the book moves through an erratic, occasionally disconnected, history of Shakespeare-use in media technologies as a means of illustrating the networks that shape Shakespearean reproduction. Media technology is led by consumerist trends, and Douglas M. Lanier notes the shift in tastes that has driven teens away from movies toward vlogging and web-series. Accordingly, Broadcast Your Shakespeare places a greater emphasis on new media. Essays by Kirk Hendershott-Kraetzer and Romano Mullin focus on how platforms such as Tumblr and Twitter generate participatory communities of readers; Anna Blackwell, writing about Hiddleston, considers the manipulation of cultural capital that occurs when a movie star is rebranded as a Shakespearean actor. Predigital media is less well represented: essays by Robert Sawyer, Darlena Ciraulo, and Joseph Haughey encourage the reader to make connections between Hollow Crown fans and the work of such cultural giants as Max Reinhardt and Orson Welles.

The essays are organized into three categories of broadcasting: the politics of broadcast, audience study, and the intersection between celebrity and identity. The inevitable overlap that occurs across these categories underscores the validity of recognizing the production of media as an act of consumption—an idea that is common to Web 2.0's "participatory" culture and that offers opportunities for new theorizations of the dialogic relationship between Shakespeare and media. David C. Moberly's excellent essay on Wikipedia's role in shaping both Shakespeare and the field of Shakespeare studies suggests that concerns about how Shakespeare is defined in an open-access environment implicate academics and make it urgent that we model a more inclusive Shakespeare community. Moberly departs from a consideration of what is represented on Wikipedia in favor of examining why it is there, and his work is representative of the book's larger approach to its subject. Moberly traces attempts to publish an authorship debate on the Shakespeare Wikipedia page and concludes that, on Wikipedia, Shakespeare continues to be "only for certain privileged groups of people" (102). Broadcast Your Shakespeare uses history and current media theory to demonstrate that, in spite of the promise of democracy...