Bloomsbury Lockdown Shakespeare: New Evolutions in Performance and Adaptation (Shakespeare 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 evolution 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. Such work also opened up possibilities for international collaboration, with many productions involving truly global casts and attracting audiences located around the world. Additional productions discussed include 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: The Lockdown Chronicles and Justina Taft Mattos’s Moore – A Pacific Island Othello, as well as non-Shakespearean productions including the Old Vic’s In Camera: Lungs and Fake Friends’ This American Wife. About the Author Gemma Kate Allred is a doctoral researcher at the Université de Neuchâtel, Switzerland. Benjamin Broadribb is a doctoral researcher at The Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, UK. Erin Sullivan is Reader in Shakespeare at The Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, UK.