Lockdown Shakespeare: New Evolutions in Performance and Adaptation

This edited collection offers the first in-depth analysis and sourcebook for ‘Lockdown Shakespeare’. It brings together scholars of stage, screen, early modern and adaptation studies to examine the work that emerged during the Covid-19 pandemic and considers issues of form, liveness, reception, presence and community. Interviews with theatre makers and artists illuminate the challenges and benefits of creating new work online, while educators consider how digital tools have facilitated the teaching of Shakespeare through performance. Together, the chapters in this book offer readers the definitive work on the performance and adaptation of Shakespeare online during the pandemic. From The Show Must Go Online, which presented Shakespeare’s First Folio via YouTube, to Creation Theatre and Big Telly’s interactive The Tempest and Macbeth, which used Zoom as their stage, the book documents the variety and richness of work that emerged during the pandemic. It reveals how, by taking Shakespeare online in new and innovative ways, the theatre industry sparked the evolution of new forms of performance with their own conventions, aesthetics and notions of liveness. Among the other productions discussed are Arden Theatre Company’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Tender Claws’ ‘The Under Presents: Tempest’, The Shakespeare Ensemble’s What You Will, Merced Shakespearefest’s Ricardo II, CtrlAltRepeat’s Midsummer Night Stream, Sally McLean’s Shakespeare Republic: #AllTheWebsAStage (The Lockdown Chronicles) and Justina Taft Mattos’s Moore – A Pacific Island Othello.

Gemma Allred is a doctoral researcher at the University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland. With Benjamin Broadribb she is the founder of the 'Action is Eloquence': (Re)thinking Shakespeare blog, which has published reviews and interviews relating to lockdown theatre since March (https://medium.com/action-is-eloquence-re-thinking-shakespeare / Twitter: https://twitter.com/rethinkingshax).

Benjamin Broadribb is a doctoral researcher at the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham. With Gemma Allred he is the founder of the 'Action is Eloquence': (Re)thinking Shakespeare blog, which has published reviews and interviews relating to lockdown theatre since March (https://medium.com/action-is-eloquence-re-thinking-shakespeare / Twitter: https://twitter.com/rethinkingshax).

Mark Thornton Burnett is Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen's University Belfast, UK. His books include Shakespeare and World Cinema (2013), 'Hamlet' and World Cinema (2019), Constructing 'Monsters' in Shakespearean Drama and Early Modern Culture (2002) and Filming Shakespeare in the Global Marketplace (2007; 2nd ed. 2012). He is series editor of the Arden Shakespeare series Shakespeare and Adaptation.

Erin Sullivan is Reader in Shakespeare at the Shakespeare institute, University of Birmingham, UK. She is the author of Shakespeare and Digital Performance in Practice (2022) and Beyond Melancholy: Sadness and Selfhood in Renaissance England (2016).