Shakespeare, Technicity, Theatre. By W. B. Worthen

Abstract

Serendipitously timed for a period of digital theater, W. B. Worthen’s intricate monograph studies the complex technicity of modern performances of William Shakespeare’s plays. Pushing back against the notion that theater suddenly became aware of techne and that its intermediality rests upon the digital age, Worthen situates his study within the historical precedent that theater always existed as an emerging technology, one that resists being reduced to a singular medium. And Shakespeare’s plays document the innovative technologies of the Renaissance theater. Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Worthen points out, “is fascinated by the media recording—the ‘Words, words, words’ of the book he used to torment Polonius—and by the media of display as well: clothing, gesture, games, and the stage” (38). As such, Worthen persuasively asks how technicity of modern theater practice—specifically the apparatus of Shakespeare performance—operates as a dispositif through which theater reifies itself as a technological apparatus. In doing so, Worthen attempts to redress the “vanishing object”: the inevitable obsolescence of performance and its technologies in a cultural moment (37).