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Shakespeare, Spectatorship and the Technologies of Performance by Pascale Aebischer (review)

Shakespeare, Spectatorship and the Technologies of Performance opens with the story of Emma Rice’s short and controversial stint as the Artistic Director at Shakespeare’s Globe, an appointment that ended in cancellation by technology—Rice’s installation of sound and light equipment apparently a bridge too far at the seventeenth-century replica. Aebischer reads the decision to terminate Rice’s tenure as symptomatic of the fraught character of the UK’s stance toward Shakespeare, caught “between purist nostalgia for a simpler past of human interaction, associated with the Shakespeare brand as a universal guarantor of humanist value, continuity and national pride, and the acceleration of the technological innovation and digital communication that contribute to globalisation” (2). Her book, then, sets out to explore this tension via “a historically grounded spatial theory of technologically mediated spectatorship” (2), and to argue that the ways in which audiences receive, understand, and enjoy performances of Shakespeare’s plays have been fundamentally changed by the technologies exploited in many contemporary productions. Before this introduction and the book proper, however, Aebischer hails her readers through a short injunction, “How to Read this Book” (xv). She wants us to know that, while each of the substantial case studies can be profitably engaged on its own terms, it will be better understood if the introduction is fully digested first. This is good advice. The introduction provides a smart, detailed, and accessible walkthrough of key theoretical debates that range from the perennially knotty problem of liveness to practices of intermedial performance, from affective responses to impacts of spatiality. Aebischer’s meticulous engagement with relevant theory and criticism places the reader on a secure footing from which to investigate her case studies—the first of these, a study of two productions at the indoor Sam Wanamaker Playhouse at Shakespeare’s Globe; the second, a survey of the burgeoning incorporation of digital technologies in live performance during her period of study (2009–16); and the third, an evaluation of live-to-screen broadcasting (a topic that has certainly become all the more commonplace and vital during the extended period of COVID lockdowns). Book Reviews