This chapter focuses primarily upon three adaptations of Hamlet created and performed online during the COVID-19 pandemic: an episode of Elliot Barnes-Worrell’s Instagram series Thinking Out Loud: Quarantine Shakespeare, released in April 2020; an episode of the web series Shakespeare Republic: #AllTheWebsAStage (The Lockdown Chronicles) directed by Sally McLean, released in September 2020; and a production by The Show Must Go Online directed by Rob Myles, performed live via Zoom and streamed to YouTube in August 2020. All three adaptations are infused with the cultural moment of lockdown: performed at home by isolated individuals using domestically sourced props and costumes, and streamed or recorded using smartphones, laptops and video conferencing software. I propose that digital performances and adaptations of Shakespeare created during the pandemic regularly offer examples of metamodernism, which has been put forward as the dominant cultural logic of the opening decades of the twenty-first century, succeeding late twentieth-century postmodernism. Cultural theorist Timotheus Vermeulen argues that a key feature of the metamodern sensibility is a ‘new depthiness’, in contrast to the ‘new depthlessness’ which characterised postmodern works. Hamlet is a character who has regularly been depthlessly (de)constructed in modern popular culture through caricatured tropes and memetic afterlives. This chapter places the productions of Barnes-Worrell, McLean and Myles in conversation with the postmodern Hamlets of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century; performed during the pandemic, Hamlet and its title character gained a metamodern ‘depthiness’, as creatives explored the character’s affective potential anew.

错误:搜索内容不能为空,请输入英文关键词
错误:关键词超出字数限制,请精简
高级检索

The “new depthiness” of Hamlet in Lockdown Digital Performance

  • Benjamin Broadribb

摘要

This chapter focuses primarily upon three adaptations of Hamlet created and performed online during the COVID-19 pandemic: an episode of Elliot Barnes-Worrell’s Instagram series Thinking Out Loud: Quarantine Shakespeare, released in April 2020; an episode of the web series Shakespeare Republic: #AllTheWebsAStage (The Lockdown Chronicles) directed by Sally McLean, released in September 2020; and a production by The Show Must Go Online directed by Rob Myles, performed live via Zoom and streamed to YouTube in August 2020. All three adaptations are infused with the cultural moment of lockdown: performed at home by isolated individuals using domestically sourced props and costumes, and streamed or recorded using smartphones, laptops and video conferencing software. I propose that digital performances and adaptations of Shakespeare created during the pandemic regularly offer examples of metamodernism, which has been put forward as the dominant cultural logic of the opening decades of the twenty-first century, succeeding late twentieth-century postmodernism. Cultural theorist Timotheus Vermeulen argues that a key feature of the metamodern sensibility is a ‘new depthiness’, in contrast to the ‘new depthlessness’ which characterised postmodern works. Hamlet is a character who has regularly been depthlessly (de)constructed in modern popular culture through caricatured tropes and memetic afterlives. This chapter places the productions of Barnes-Worrell, McLean and Myles in conversation with the postmodern Hamlets of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century; performed during the pandemic, Hamlet and its title character gained a metamodern ‘depthiness’, as creatives explored the character’s affective potential anew.