YouTube, Use, and the Idea of the Archive

Abstract

AFTER SHAKESPEARE ON FILM come desktop digital interfaces that put film--and films of theatrical performances, digital video, shots from mobile cameras, and other related technologies--on our laptops. As our titular after encapsulates, these downloadable texts are chronologically secondary, ontologically derivative, and commercially aggressive. These video-sharing sites, paradigmatically YouTube, act as an (of Shakespearean performances, among many other things) that in some ways contrasts with conventional archives, but in other ways reveals their long-standing but under-recognized aspects. Etymologically, archive conveys not only origin, but spatial fixity: the building wherein primary documents are kept. We now find ourselves with different kinds of mobile archives that we access through cyberspace--YouTube and Early English Books Online (EEBO) alike--and can ask what difference this peripatetic access makes, as the memorial function of these notebook-accessible digital archives replaces spatial lieux de memoire with environmental milieux de memoire. (1) Derrida claimed that could be no archiving without ... the of legitimization, without criteria of classification and of hierarchization. (2) Technology seems alternatively to have amplified or to have run around Derrida's sine qua non of archival principles. (3) How do the uses that video-sharing sites sponsor--nonspecialist access, wild heterogeneity, fragmentation of samples, and temporal leveling--impact ways we imagine what archives are, how we use them, and how they use us? What uses can Shakespeareans and their students make of YouTube? And what might early modern scholars bring to analysis of emergent broadcast technologies? Teaching A Midsummer Night's Dream? YouTube offers almost four thousand clips, many of the Act 2, scene 3 for Mr. Green's English Class genre. Others show snippets of full-scale theatrical productions, commercial films, and far-flung adaptations. Some longer productions are available as well; the size of YouTube's upload allowance has changed over time, as has the response of copyright holders to unlicensed use, so that maximum length varies, but the norm remains under ten minutes. (4) The proliferation of student scenes suggests particularly lively operation of Derrida's archontic principle of the archive: although governed by set principles of inclusion and hierarchy, the seeks to enlarge itself. YouTube's users continually post new clips to the archive, replay what thereby becomes repertoire, and add new performances into the mix. Thus, the click of mouse brings up not only staggeringly myriad student projects, but also such varied morsels as the 1935 Max Reinhardt Warner Brothers' studio film (in sixteen sub-ten-minute segments); seven minutes of Diana Rigg and Helen Mirren, plus separate one-minute-fifty-eight-second segment of a seminude Judi Dench from Peter Hall's 1968 Royal Shakespeare Company film; motley offerings--frequently the trailer--from the 1999 Michael Hoffman film; Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck playing Demetrius and Lysander on 1960s television; and Levis 501 jeans commercial rather incoherently set to Titania's ode to Bottom. Browsing the playlist reveals that searching Shakespearean play on YouTube--presumably significant, perhaps primary, encounter for many of our students--yields an experience that is striking for its variety, fragmentation, and temporal leveling. The force of this accretion tends in multiple directions, rather than neatly aligning democratized access with subversion (or recuperation), remediation with fidelity (or innovation). (5) On the one hand, YouTube's foregrounds use (what people might do with scene) before recovery (what the scene is supposed to mean: what Robert Scholes calls the secrethiddendeepermeaning that is taken to be the privileged province of English teachers). (6) YouTube reveals how very many ways there are to perform single Shakespearean scene. …