Interactive, Immersive, Original Shakespeare

Abstract

Original Practices Shakespeare embraces an evolving range of practices, and yet the rhetoric of its retrotech aesthetic is often sustained by three interlocking terms, two of which owe their widespread dissemination, in part at least, to the goals of digital technology: OP is immersive, it's interactive, and it's democratic. This essay explores the interplay of these terms in the conceptual apparatus of OP, taking the discussion of Emma Rice's dismissal from the Globe in 2016 to bring the ideological tensions animating the notion of democratic technologies into focus.