Mediatic Shakespeare: The Dynamics of Orality, Script and Print in the Plays and Poems

Shakespeare produced his works during a media shift that was unmatched – until our own.

Mediatic Shakespeare by media theorist Richard Cavell examines how Shakespeare’s writing engaged with the cultural upheaval of an era shifting rapidly from spoken traditions towards print materials. Cavell argues that print was an active cultural force that was in the process of reshaping Shakespeare’s world and work. Nostalgic for oral communality, Shakespeare engaged guardedly with print, producing a media dynamic that resonates throughout his work.

Drawing on media theorists from Marshall McLuhan to Friedrich Kittler and Bernhard Siegert, Cavell traces Shakespeare’s engagement with the effects of a media ecology in which knowing and being were aggressively in flux.
Structured across four chapters, Mediatic Shakespeare explores Shakespeare’s media ecology, the unsettling interfaces of orality and literacy, the breakdown of the sensus communis, and the implications for his work of the printing involution.

Richard Cavell is a professor in the Department of English Language and Literatures at the University of British Columbia and co-founder of their media studies program.