Shakespeare & New Media
When I first read Shakespeare, I thought, “Ah, this guy is mid.” I was so wrong. I might not have liked his plays but so much art and evolution has come out of them. In this short rant, I want to detail some of the art that has evolved from Shakespeare as a result of changing media forms.
Shakespeare’s plays were intended to be performed in theaters like the Globe Theatre. It used to hold thousands of people in bustling open-air theaters. It housed all manner of individuals from poor people in the pit to wealthy individuals in the balcony. Given the timing, sets were less of a factor; the words and the costumes were central to the play. The actors relied on their voices and gestures to bring the text alive, leaving much to the imagination of the audience. The way people experienced Shakespeare’s plays was almost communal, an event where the shared experience of theater brought everyone into the world of the play.
Over time, however, this evolved. As literature became more widely available, Shakespeare’s plays were printed and handed to generations of English students. Suddenly, these once-living performances were static words on a page. This shift meant Shakespeare’s works were now something you read in the classroom, dissected line by line, reducing the larger-than-life experience to a mere academic exercise. Students no longer saw the immediacy of the performance but instead analyzed the text from a distance, often without the same sense of theatrical magic.
However, that’s seen a recent shift in media like the Blade of Tempest, which takes that Shakespearean re-imagination and cultivates a new world built of the same tropes and narratives. It is an absolute masterpiece and I would highly recommend it to the non-brain-rotted reader. But, it is interesting to see because it feels as if the plot and the narrative complexity is only increasing as it takes a more reductionary form like that of television. The same can be said about Baz Luhrmann’s adaptation of Romeo and Juliet. There are ways in which the source material can be expanded on not reduced through the transmutation of the media which seems like a direct face slap to Marshall McLuhan’s media ecology phrase: “The medium is the message”
The way the art is performed requires heavy articulation and thought on behalf of the art director to resist reducing the art through the “rules” or “new normal” of the medium. This is only to say that as we move to that of an AI culture dominated by new medium rules, the future may not be as bad as we expect from a media standpoint. It will likely upend how we think of and process episodic information entirely. For a successful reinvention and creation of new artistic work that expands on the existing lineage, we will need directors with careful thought and attention to detail.