2. - Studies in Shakespeare in Performance, 2020–2021

Summary

When Pascale Aebischer’s Shakespeare, Spectatorship and the Technologies of Performance was published in 2020, the first lockdown in response to the COVID-19 pandemic was already in place in the UK. In the light of these circumstances, in Viral Shakespeare in the Cambridge Elements series (2021), she reflects on her ‘responses to some of the unique spectatorial configurations, novel experiences and creative innovations that emerged in the time of the pandemic’ (8). The result is a remarkable personal account of the ‘fleeting insights and experiences garnered from watching Shakespeare in lockdown’, which are ‘worth preserving because they speak to a moment of unprecedented intensity and emotional rawness that is profoundly marked by Shakespeare’ (11). ‘Viral’ is, of course, a metaphorical adjective in the digital world that has acquired a distinctive resonance since the beginning of 2020. Aebischer describes an important consequence of the sudden abundance of Shakespeare performances available online: ‘The broadcasts intersect and impact one another so that precursors turn into successors, what follows after can change the meaning of what comes before, and dialogues between productions defy the laws of chronology. The linearity of succession makes way for viral interpenetration, as contagion travels freely between any broadcasts that come into contact’ (25).