Abstract
This article considers the impact of digital technologies on Shakespeare's status as author. Digital technology encourages a more democratic engagement with literature which privileges the reader and thereby moderates the author's powerful hold over their text. As a result, it is to be expected that with the increased availability of digital tools, Shakespeare's status and conventional, universalist readings of his works might decline. Technologies have the potential to open up Shakespeare's works to new kinds of readers: these include academics studying Shakespeare's works perspectives outside the traditional disciplines of literary and performance studies, but also the general public who appropriate Shakespeare when shaping their online identities, or contribute to digital repositories of Shakespeare references. My paper considers the contradiction that while, in theory, digital technologies invite the reader to wrest control from the author, in practice those tools are sometimes used to bolster Shakespeare's universal value and genius. I consider the ultimate effect on Shakespeare's author status when digital technologies are applied to his works, and suggest that one way to measure this might be to explore appropriations of Shakespeare's characters online by individual internet users.
Highlights
Terry Eagleton’s suggestion in 1983 that Shakespeare’s works and other canonical literature might one day become obsolete and that, extending this idea, it is impossible to identify any literary text as unquestionably, objectively “good” or valuable, strongly contradicted received knowledge in conventional, historical Shakespeare criticism and New Criticism
Eagleton’s insistence on the materiality of the literary text—that its meaning is dependent on the context in which it is read, and that there is a kind of transformation at work in each reading and rereading—offered a healthy critical rejuvenation of Shakespeare studies, meaning that Shakespeare could be read through the frameworks of postcolonial, Marxist, and gender theory, for example
With the recent availability of digital texts including hypertexts and digitised versions of Shakespeare’s plays, that the process hastened by Eagleton would become even more prevalent, and discussions of Shakespeare as a kind of universal “visionary” would cease
Summary
Terry Eagleton’s suggestion in 1983 that Shakespeare’s works and other canonical literature might one day become obsolete and that, extending this idea, it is impossible to identify any literary text as unquestionably, objectively “good” or valuable, strongly contradicted received knowledge in conventional, historical Shakespeare criticism and New Criticism. Literary studies is offered a much more exciting critical position from which they can reread Shakespeare It might be assumed, with the recent availability of digital texts including hypertexts and digitised versions of Shakespeare’s plays, that the process hastened by Eagleton would become even more prevalent, and discussions of Shakespeare as a kind of universal “visionary” would cease. Ongoing arguments in authorship studies tend to argue either, with these recent prominent studies, that Shakespeare was a figure of agency who directly promoted his own author status and public persona, or alternatively that Shakespeare did not exist as the genuine author of the works attributed to him This alternative approach implies that Shakespeare’s status can be appropriated if research proves that other writers and collectives have been responsible for many of the works attributed to him. The canonical author figure has become a rigorously contested concept within literary studies, this paper is concerned with spheres where the concept of the canonical status of the author prevails, including popular conceptions of the author in mainstream culture, including social interaction online, and academic research on Shakespeare from outside literary studies
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