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 Kate Allred is a doctoral researcher at the University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland. Her thesis focuses on how Shakespeare was marketed and sold in England, focusing particularly on 1960-2020 in conversation with 1660-1720. Her research has been published in Shakespeare Survey.

Benjamin Broadribb is a doctoral researcher at the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, UK. His thesis focusses on 21st-century screen adaptations and appropriations of Shakespeare. He has contributed a chapter to an edited collection Shakespeare on Screen: Romeo and Juliet.

Gemma Allred and Benjamin Broadribb are co-founders of ’Action is Eloquence’: Rethinking Shakespeare blog, which has published reviews and interviews relating to lockdown theatre since March 2020 (https: //medium.com/action-is-eloquence-re-thinking-shakespeare / Twitter: https: //twitter.com/rethinkingshax).

Erin Sullivan is Senior Lecturer at the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, UK. She is co-editor of A Year of Shakespeare and Shakespeare on the Global Stage (both with The Arden Shakespeare) and author of Beyond Melancholy. Her work on Shakespeare and digital performance has appeared in Shakespeare Bulletin, Shakespeare, and Participations.