The goal of this special session, “Augmenting Shakespeare,” is to explore the experience of consuming Shakespeare in the age of Virtual and Augmented Reality through an app-driven classroom, a “backstage” view of the virtual Globe, and the virtual experience of playing the Ghost in Hamlet 360. What these events share in common is that the reality through which we are perceiving and understanding Shakespeare is augmented in some way. This panel will explore what the human, lived experience is of that virtual augmentation. How can we account for spectatorship and interactivity in the augmented Shakespeare? In view of a culture that is ever more fascinated by technology, yet yearning for access and connection, this panel examines how VR/AR technology adapts human perception, and allows audiences and students to find a connection to Shakespeare, his world, and his texts, that was perhaps previously inaccessible.
This panel engages first with notions of interactivity and immersion in performances of Shakespeare from Christie Carson’s “Technology as a Bridge to Audience Participation?” (2011) to William Worthen’s “Interactive, Immersive, Original Shakespeare” (2017). Christy Desmet’s work on the ways Shakespeare’s language is brought into the realm of the individual spectator, who can search, re-arrange and save bits of Shakespeare in a post-modern kind of commonplace book, pre-figures applications we will be discussing that bring an augmented reality of Shakespearean characters and landscape before the viewer (“Shakespeare and the Digitized World” (2016)). Desmet’s attention to pedagogy, using technology, is important as well. Jennifer Ailles’s writing on apps in Daniel Fischlin’s important OuterSpeares (2014) situates tech-Shakespeare in the lived experience of the user. Our panel seeks to interrogate that lived experience further by acknowledging the perceptual dissonance created in augmenting reality. Scholars interested in the technology of the book and the representation of data in Shakespeare’s plays, like MJ Kidnie and Alan Galey, speak to the way new technologies can find resonance and a home in Shakespeare. And Gina Bloom’s dynamic, “Gaming the Stage: Playable Media and the Rise of the English Commercial Theater” instructs the field to look for the ways that theatrical form of play is embedded and responsive to the new media. Finally, Victoria Szabo’s attention to augmented reality in “Apprehending the Past: Augmented Reality, Archives, and Cultural Memory” situates the use of this technology in museum and tourist venues which both enshrine and free cultural memory in a way that will impact the future of Shakespeare studies.
Dr. John Misak’s presentation, “Perchance to Learn: Hamlet with Augmented Reality: an AR Application for Understanding Shakespeare,” illustrates an AR game created by Misak to aid in teaching Hamlet. The app superimposes the world of the play on our world, and therefore allows students to see scenes brought to life before them. Misak’s research has found that AR technology presents a high retention rate, but also allows teachers to see (based on student interactions with the app) where there is a failure of understanding. In many ways, Dr. Misak’s work on this app connects with Gina Bloom’s creation of “Play the Knave” and Elizabeth Hunter’s “Something Wicked,” but as an application with an expressly classroom-driven purpose on a handheld device, Misak’s use of augmented reality in this regard is unique. Misak is particularly interested in the implications of the application on cognition, narrative understanding, and new ways of writing about literature.
While teaching and learning about Shakespeare often happens in the context of the classroom, we also know that alternative sites for Shakespeare experiences abound, e.g. the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and the new Globe in London. How these cultural sites of Shakespeare interactions engage virtual and augmented reality are the concern of Valerie Clayman Pye’s presentation, “’If there be truth in sight’: Augmented Reality and Shakespeare Tourism.” Focusing on Globe 360, the app that allows users to tour the replica of Shakespeare’s theatre, Clayman Pye is interested in the privileged perspective of the site for virtual tourists. From the comfort of one’s own screen, one is granted access to the theatrical version of Erving Goffman’s coveted “back”: the Globe stage. As stated above, in a culture hungry for “access” this kind of viewing is irresistible. This paper interrogates the ways augmented and virtual reality disrupt Goffman’s notion of “front/back,” and how that disruption informs the user experience. In Dr. Clayman Pye’s reading technology encourages the blending of experiential modes to create “authentic” experiences in the augmented virtual world.
Finally, Betsy Sullivan’s paper, “Digital and Bodily Immersion in New Media Shakespeare,” asks how virtual or augmented productions of Shakespeare allow an audience to make a connection that demands a kind of physical and mental immersion that is absent from a typical theatrical experience. Comparing expressly immersive theater experiences, like the live- interactive performance of “Sleep No More,” with the recent VR adaptation of Hamlet, by Commonwealth Shakespeare, Hamlet 360: Thy Father’s Spirit, Sullivan develops a way of re-framing these experiences attendant to the spectator’s interactions. Sullivan is interested in the ways connectivity are enhanced by AR/VR technology (in Hamlet 360 the viewer takes on the perspective of the ghost), and diminished as the viewer is isolated in true human connection like one experiences in an audience.
Each panelist will have 18 minutes of time to present, and we will allow 15 minutes for questions. In addition, the panelists will be showing versions of the apps, etc. on the projector (which we will need) and in addition, Dr. Misak’s app will be accessible if members of the audience have a smartphone with them. Papers will be made available ahead of time and links to any VR/AR applications and performances.