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 of 2020 and considers issues of form, liveness, reception 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 global pandemic.

From The Show Must Go Online, which presented the entire canon via YouTube, to Creation Theatre’s interactive The Tempest and Macbeth, which used Zoom as their stage, the book documents the variety and richness of work that emerged. 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 casts spread across several countries and attracting audiences located around the world. Productions discussed include TSMGO’s The Winter’s Tale, Arden Theatre Company’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Matthew Warcus’s In Camera: Lungs.