Live Shakespeare on Screen

About

Shakespeares plays were written for live performance in a very specific theatrical culture, for particular actors to perform on the stages of early modern London, to an audience that understood and expected conventions such as direct address, non-naturalistic staging, blackface performance and boys playing womens parts. Those conventions shaped how audiences understood, for example, the final scene of Othello, where Richard Burbage in blackface make-up smothered a teenage boy in whiteface make-up before launching into a soliloquy. Since then, not only have theatrical conventions changed quite fundamentally, but so has the manner in which we consume live Shakespeare. The advent of digital theatre broadcasting technologies, with multi-camera set-ups, has brought live Shakespeare to our screens, whether in a local arts cinema or our homes.

Why should we pay attention to the medium, when what we get to see is still somehow live Shakespeare performed by star performers on London (and Stratford) stages? This lecture will take you on a journey through the backstage and offscreen decision-making processes that re-shape theatrical productions of Shakespeares plays for present-day screen audiences. It will pay particular attention to examples where broadcast technologies, which aim very hard to remain invisible to screen audiences in order to produce a sense of theatrical immersion, affect how viewers decode gender, race, and power relations. Drawing on examples from Shakespeare broadcasts, it will show how conventions of direct address, speed of editing, camera shots with zoom lenses, casting and lighting for skin tones affect what we see, whom we see, and how we interpret what we see when we watch live Shakespeare in the cinema.

Pascale Aebischer is Professor of Shakespeare and Early Modern Performance Studies at the University of Exeter. She has a long-standing interest in the relationship between early modern performance conventions and their translation into present-day media, whether those are modern stages with their full technological apparatus, or cinematic and digital performances. Her books include Shakespeares Violated Bodies: Stage and Screen Performance (Cambridge, 2004), Screening Early Modern Drama: Beyond Shakespeare (Cambridge, 2013), Shakespeare, Spectatorship and the Technologies of Performance (Cambridge, 2020) and Viral Shakespeare: Performance in the Time of Pandemic (Cambridge, 2021). During and after the pandemic, she worked on projects concerned with the resilience of the theatre industry in the UK and the G7 nations. She is now returning to working on Shakespeare with an edition of Titus Andronicus.