Text,performance,screen: Shakespeare and critical media literacy

Abstract

To accommodate recent shifts in media, scholars studying the adaptation of Shakespeare to moving images have begun to embrace the rubric ‘Shakespeare on screen’. In this move, the term ‘screen’ follows a path charted by earlier terms ‘text’ and ‘performance’. All began as relatively media-specific terms and became generalised and dematerialised to meet the demands of an expanding field. This article argues that the term ‘screen’ risks obscuring distinct viewing experiences and materialities of production. Shakespeareans need to resist the impulse to abstract the particularities of screens if they are to assess fully Shakespeare’s remediation in the 21st century.