Robert Shaughnessy
Summary
Drawing upon Jacques Rancière’s notion of the ‘emancipated spectator’, this paper identifies some of the key concerns that arise from the conception of interactivity as a mode of political intervention, and interrogates the current preoccupation with Shakespearean immersiveness by focusing on the example of the (reconstructed) Shakespeare’s Globe.
Abstract
Three terms that have enjoyed some currency in performance and performance studies in recent times: the interactive, the participatory, and the immersive. Although they are not exact synonyms, they have been embraced by, and applied to, a variety of contemporary approaches to theatre-making and to theatre works themselves, which in recent years have increasingly included the plays of Shakespeare. Often at stake in this events are strong convictions about the nature of the theatregoing experience, and about how it differs from – some might say improves upon or even discredits – what is assumed to be the ‘conventional’, or at least dominant, mode of theatrical delivery, which, for the sake of brevity today, is that of the immobile, seated and (it is assumed, though in my view mistakenly) passive spectator, who is positioned as the consumer of a packaged and predetermined spectacle from which she is distanced and detached, and in which he is powerless to intervene. Drawing upon Jacques Rancière’s notion of the ‘emancipated spectator’, this paper starts by identifying some of the key concerns that arise from the conception of interactivity as a mode of political intervention, and interrogates the current preoccupation with Shakespearean immersiveness by focusing on the example of the (reconstructed) Shakespeare’s Globe. As an instance of radical site-specificity that, however much it has encouraged a rethinking of performer and spectator behaviour, it is implicated within a particularly reductive form of literalism, this project yields some perhaps unexpected connections between reconstructed early modern performance and some current forms of contemporary environmental, site-specific and immersive theatre. Involved in these transactions are ethical as well as aesthetic matters of affect and effect, and the paper concludes by posing the question: what is Shakespeare good for?