Technology and Culture

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...