Reviewed by:

• Shakespeare, Technicity, Theatre by W. B. Worthen, and: Shakespeare, Spectatorship, and the Technologies of Performance by Pascale Aebischer
• Sarah Kriger (bio)

Shakespeare, Technicity, Theatre By W. B. Worthen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. 278.

Shakespeare, Spectatorship, and the Technologies of Performance By Pascale Aebischer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. 256.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, theater companies across the globe have turned in unprecedented numbers to technologies such as online streaming. This brave new world of liveness mediated through screens and software suggests many fruitful lines of questioning of the relationships between performance, meaning, and technological affordances. Though each of their books was written and researched pre-pandemic, theater scholars W. B. Worthen and Pascale Aebischer both address similar areas especially pertinent to studies of COVID-era productions.

In Shakespeare, Technicity, and Theatre, Worthen explores the technicity of contemporary theater using recent performances, predominantly of Shakespeare or Shakespearean adaptations, as case studies. Worthen's "technicity" encompasses all the technologies of theater and theatricality: those representing technologies to the audience during performance (such as props), those that make the performance possible (such as audio equipment), and those made material in architecture, texts, and the bodies of performers. Worthen uses "technicity" to avoid reifying technologies as mere material tools used in theater, or oversimplifying theater by identifying it as another technology in itself; instead, he wants the reader to understand the blurry collaboration between ever-evolving technologies, human artists and audiences, and the acts of performance themselves.

In the chapters that follow his explanation of the project's theoretical foundation, Worthen discusses the use of live-feed video via three recent productions adapted from Shakespearean sources; examines the technologies (particularly smartphone apps) used to manage the texts of plays for both pedagogical and production purposes; analyzes contemporary performance spaces' definition and application of technological practices alleged to resemble those of Shakespeare's time; challenges the idea of immersive theater as a distinct theatrical technology by considering the recent immersive re-working of Macbeth, Punchdrunk's Sleep No More; and reflects on the ramifications of what he terms an "algorithmic" model, in which text (such as script) is considered to be an algorithm that generates a specific theater piece.

If this sounds both ambitious and eclectic, that's because it is; Worthen's book encompass a dazzling variety of texts, performances, and productions [End Page 652] and draws from various theories of theater as well as of technology. His thesis is less a standalone argument accessible to scholars of other disciplines as it is a rebuttal to certain perceptions of the role of technology within theater production and scholarship: theatrical technology can't be understood as a distinct set of tools with particular outcomes for performance but must instead be considered a fluid and ubiquitous network of contributors to the creation of meaning.

Due to this context, familiarity with both theatrical scholarship and recent productions is necessary to follow several key threads of the book; Worthen doesn't linger on, for example, descriptions of the productions he credits as "collaborators" in his analysis, rendering some otherwise interesting examples opaque, nor does he precisely define the scope of his project. For instance, all but a few trivial examples draw from the Western European theater tradition that traces its roots to ancient Greece, but Worthen doesn't explicitly define the area or period of study, adding to his focus on contemporary Shakespeare productions extended examples from the work of mid-twentieth-century playwright Samuel Beckett. While this variety makes some fascinating connections possible, it can also make it difficult to follow each example's relationship with the stated overall argument.

Overall, Worthen's marriage of fundamental concepts from the philosophy of technology to wide-ranging theories from theater scholarship may require readers to arrive to his text with more knowledge of the latter than most scholars of technology typically cultivate; however, for those with a background in both subjects, Worthen's analysis suggests many exciting avenues of exploration—not only...

审核人：

• WB Worthen 的莎士比亚、技术、戏剧，以及Pascale Aebischer 的莎士比亚、观众和表演技术
• 莎拉·克里格（生物）

莎士比亚，技术，戏剧WB Worthen。剑桥：剑桥大学出版社，2020 年。Pp。278.

Pascale Aebischer 的莎士比亚、观众和表演技术。剑桥：剑桥大学出版社，2020 年。Pp。256.

在 COVID-19 大流行期间，全球的剧院公司以前所未有的数量转向在线流媒体等技术。这个通过屏幕和软件介导的生动新世界暗示了对性能、意义和技术可供性之间关系的许多富有成效的质疑。尽管他们的每一本书都是在大流行前撰写和研究的，但戏剧学者 WB Worthen 和 Pascale Aebischer 都涉及类似的领域，尤其是与 COVID 时代作品的研究相关的领域。

在莎士比亚、技术和戏剧中, Worthen 使用最近的表演（主要是莎士比亚或莎士比亚改编的作品）作为案例研究来探索当代戏剧的技术性。Worthen 的“技术性”涵盖了戏剧和戏剧的所有技术：那些在表演过程中向观众展示技术的技术（例如道具），那些使表演成为可能的技术（例如音频设备），以及那些在建筑、文本和表演者的尸体。Worthen 使用“技术性”来避免将技术具体化为仅用于戏剧的物质工具，或通过将戏剧本身视为另一种技术来过度简化戏剧；相反，他希望读者理解不断发展的技术、人类艺术家和观众以及表演行为本身之间的模糊合作。

在他对项目理论基础的解释之后的章节中，Worthen 通过改编自莎士比亚来源的三部近期作品讨论了实时视频的使用；检查用于管理戏剧文本​​的技术（特别是智能手机应用程序），以用于教学和制作目的；分析当代表演空间对据称与莎士比亚时代相似的技术实践的定义和应用；通过考虑最近对Macbeth 的沉浸式重新制作，Punchdrunk's Sleep No More挑战沉浸式剧院作为一种独特的戏剧技术的想法; 并反思了他所谓的“算法”模型的后果，在该模型中，文本（如脚本）被认为是一种生成特定戏剧作品的算法。

如果这听起来既雄心勃勃又不拘一格，那是因为它是；Worthen 的书包含各种令人眼花缭乱的文本、表演和作品[End Page 652]，并借鉴了各种戏剧和技术理论。他的论文不是其他学科的学者可以理解的独立论点，因为它反驳了对技术在戏剧制作和学术中的作用的某些看法：戏剧技术不能被理解为一组具有特定表演效果的独特工具但必须被视为一个流动的、无处不在的创造意义的贡献者网络。

由于这种背景，熟悉戏剧学术和最近的作品对于遵循本书的几个关键主题是必要的；例如，Worthen 并没有停留在对他在分析中称为“合作者”的作品的描述，使一些其他有趣的例子变得不透明，也没有准确定义他的项目范围。例如，除了少数几个微不足道的例子外，所有的例子都取材于追溯到古希腊的西欧戏剧传统，但 Worthen 没有明确定义研究领域或时期，增加了他对当代莎士比亚作品的关注，扩展了来自古希腊的例子。二十世纪中叶剧作家塞缪尔·贝克特的作品。虽然这种多样性使一些引人入胜的联系成为可能，但它也可能使每个例子都难以遵循”

总的来说，Worthen 将技术哲学的基本概念与戏剧学术的广泛理论相结合，可能要求读者阅读他的文本时对后者的了解比大多数技术学者通常培养的要多；然而，对于那些拥有这两个学科背景的人来说，Worthen 的分析提出了许多令人兴奋的探索途径——不仅...