From the Editors of the Special Reviews Section: Shakespeare in Lockdown (review)

Partway through preparing this issue of Shakespeare Bulletin, the world's theaters went dark. As countries around the world imposed social distancing measures designed to slow the spread of COVID-19, theaters cancelled productions, tours, and rehearsals. At the time of writing (June 2020), it is still unclear when—indeed, if—anything approaching a "normal" theater industry might resume operations, and whether theater institutions (especially those without public subsidy) will be able to survive the disruption.

The response of theaters was, understandably, to remind the world that they still existed. From March 2020, the explosion of online theater introduced audiences around the world to a startling variety of productions, with Shakespeare central in programming. For larger institutions—the Royal Shakespeare Company, Shakespeare's Globe, the National Theatre, Stratford Festival, Berliner Ensemble, the Schaubühne, and many more—back catalogues of professionally recorded material were quickly made available for free in time-limited releases, with donations urgently requested. (Among the many questions raised by this model was that of how artists were being compensated for the re-use of their labour. In May 2020, the National Theatre confirmed that it would be offering artists payment for the broadcast of shows they had participated in [BBC].) The sudden global availability of archival content explodes conventional understandings of the temporally complex status of past productions, with live events coalescing around historical material, and surprising treasures (a 1957 Berliner Ensemble performance of Mother Courage starring Helene Weigel) sitting alongside recent productions.

But at the same time, companies—often small, even newly formed ones—also began developing new, designed-for-online content. Gemma Allred and Benjamin Broadribb helpfully identify two different primary modes: the "Live Online Performance" in which a live performance is recorded through videoconferencing software, and then made available online either in real-time, after the fact, or both, with donations solicited via Patreon or similar; and the "Virtual Theatre Performance" in which a one-off event happens via an online platform that allows performers and audiences to share presence, usually with paid entry (Allred and Broadribb 2020). Some of these projects, such as The Show Must Go Online, which mounted weekly stagings of Shakespeare, became regular fixtures in lockdown theater schedules; others, such as the Oxford-based Creation Theatre's Zoom Tempest, became the stuff of international news (Pellerin 2020).

Across all of these different forms of theater event was an attempt to recapture some of the key values of live theater, both to serve what was clearly felt to be a need among isolated populations around the world, and also more pragmatically to shore up the future of theater by insisting on its unique selling point. As Alexis Soloski argued, "this explosion of online Shakespeare is less about Shakespeare and more about the feeling of virtual community that the shared knowledge of the works enables" (Soloski). But this was no utopian sharing. The extraordinary "Read for the Globe" project, put together as a fundraiser in a few days in response to Shakespeare's Globe publishing a stark warning about its future, saw brilliant performances from professional and amateur actors connected online, reading sixteen plays in forty-eight hours; but the celebratory air was underpinned by the specter of potential loss. And watching professional-quality productions without the physical co-presence of fellow audience members was, as some of the contributors to this special section argue, as much a reminder of what was missing as a celebration of what was present.

The emotional impact for both theaters and audiences of trying to wrangle with what theater is in the age of COVID-19 is very real. Simon McBurney, artistic director of Complicité, recorded a new introduction to the previously released live capture of his solo show The Encounter, playing with technology to place a 2020 version of himself into the audience of a 2016 performance at London's Barbican, before standing up and tearing down a green screen in his living room and addressing himself to the camera. "In this period of confinement, we're not just asking when it will...