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The video-sharing platform YouTube signals exciting opportunities and challenges for Shakespeare studies. As patron, distributor and archive, YouTube occasions new forms of user-generated Shakespeares, yet a reduced Bard too, subject to the distractions of the contemporary networked mediascape. This book identifies the genres of YouTube Shakespeare, interpreting them through theories of remediation and media convergence and as indices of Shakespeare''s shifting cultural meanings. Exploring the intersection of YouTube''s participatory culture - its invitation to ''Broadcast Yourself'' - with its corporate logic, the book argues that YouTube Shakespeare is a site of productive tension between new forms of self-expression and the homogenizing effects of mass culture. Stephen O''Neill unfolds the range of YouTube''s Bardic productions to elaborate on their potential as teaching and learning resources. The book importantly argues for a critical media literacy, one that attends to identity constructions and to the politics of race and gender as they emerge through Shakespeare''s new media forms. Sha peare and YouTube will be of interest to students and scholars of Shakespearean drama, poetry and adaptations, as well as to new media studies.>
List of contents
Note on Procedures List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Introduction:
Interpreting YouTube Shakespeare
Chapter One:
Searchable Shakespeares: Attention, Genres and Value on YouTube
Chapter Two
Broadcast Your
Hamlet: Convergence Culture, Shakespeare and Online Self-Expression
Chapter Three
Race in YouTube Shakespeare: Ways of Seeing
Chapter Four
Medium Play, Queer Erasures:
Shakespeare's
Sonnets on YouTube
Chapter Five
The Teaching and Learning Tube:
Challenges and Affordances for Shakespeare Studies
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Stephen O'Neill is Associate Professor in English, National University of Ireland Maynooth. The
author of
Shakespeare and YouTube (Arden Shakespeare / Bloomsbury 2014),
StagingIreland: Representations in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama (2007), and co-
editor of
The Arden Research Handbook to Shakespeare and Adaptation (Arden Shakespeare /
Bloomsbury 2022), he has published widely on adapted Shakespeare. His new research is in the arboreal humanities.
