Shakespeare Unbound: How Digital & Social Media Have Transformed Performance & Audiences

Abstract

Accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, Shakespeare’s work has found new life on digital and social media. These platforms provide massive scale and new methods of audience engagement. In order to take full advantage of those methods, producers of digital and social media Shakespeare must engage in both quantitative and qualitative analyses. The performance in the content and the performance of the content both play critical roles. Using contemporary data science and established literary theory, this project articulates a taxonomy of the digital and social media Shakespeares currently online, and the platform-specific methods by which producers can employ them to engage their audience in new ways.