Shakespeare, Social Media, and the Digital Public Sphere: Such Tweet Sorrow and A Midsummer Night’s Dreaming

How has the expansion of digital culture in the twenty-first century influenced the performance of Shakespeare’s plays in and for the public sphere? This article looks at two social media adaptations produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company in the last decade: Such Tweet Sorrow (2010), a version of Romeo and Juliet performed for five weeks on Twitter, and A Midsummer Night’s Dreaming (2013), a month-long, hybrid staging of A Midsummer Night’s Dream using Google+. Drawing on digital records, practitioner interviews, and, above all, audience members’ interactive responses to the projects, this article explores how these social media re-imaginings of Shakespeare’s plays foreground questions of time, presence, participation, and ethics in the theatre as it evolves within an ever-widening digital and public sphere.