‘Pretty Much how the Internet Works’; or, Aiding and Abetting the Deprofessionalization of Shakespeare Studies

Summary

Following the thirty-fourth International Shakespeare Conference, held in August 2010 in Stratford-upon-Avon, I assumed I would not be required to think about the talk I gave there until a month or two later, when I hoped to begin revising it. Two days after arriving home, however, I received a kindly email from one Andrew Cowie of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon, letting me know that my talk ‘was being much discussed’ at the SBT, including on one of the Trust's sponsored websites, where, he suspected, my talk was being misrepresented. Curious, yet with some trepidation, I went to Blogging Shakespeare, ‘a digital experiment of the Education Team at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust’. There I read ‘The ISC: A Student's Perspective’, which appeared on 17 August 2010, and was written by ‘Shakespeare Bookshop’, or Matt Kubus, a Ph.D. student at the Shakespeare Institute. The post generated twenty comments in just a few days, including two sibling posts, one entitled, ‘Not for an age, but for all time – and all people’ at The American Shakespeare Center's Education Department Blog and one entitled, ‘Asides: Shakespeare and Access: Responding to the ISC Debate’, at The Shakespeare Standard. The sibling posts generated less commentary, just seven responses to ‘Not for an age’ and just two to ‘Responding to the ISC Debate’, but overall, Cowie judged, these were ‘a lot of comments’. To my mind, though, twenty-nine comments do not seem many at all and suggest, in a way I hope will resonate through the rest of this article, a disconnect between reality and the bloggers’ enthusiasm about democratizing Shakespeare via the internet. As Jeremy observes in ‘Responding to the ISC Debate’, ‘I read recently – I can't remember exactly where – that Ringo Starr and Shakespeare have the same approximate cultural value to the public at large.’

Given my argument in ‘Against Internet Triumphalism’, I suppose I should not have been surprised discussion of the talk migrated to the Web and, except for the writer of the first post, to those who had not heard it. But I was surprised. What surprised further – much further – was that the blogging and commentary exemplified some of the problems with internet-based cultural democracy identified in my talk. Before proceeding to discuss those problems via the blogging and commentary, as well as the argument I presented at the ISC, I would like to place this article within the topic that governed the 2010 meeting of the ISC. To do so requires some consideration of the key term in it, ‘catalyst’. When Professor Kathleen McLuskie announced two years earlier that this conference would address ‘Shakespeare as Cultural Catalyst’, she read aloud a slightly different version of this description, which appeared in the 2010 Conference Programme:

Shakespeare played a major part in the early modern cultural transformation we call the Renaissance, and has figured in every major cultural and intercultural transformation since then. The conference will explore ways in which Shakespeare has been a source of energy and inspiration for these changes, whether played out in the theatre, textual study, criticism, or the production of literature and other arts.