We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 February 2003
The implications of a technology of virtualization invite the question: ‘How does the constitution of Shakespeare as a performance event stand to be changed by its performance in the virtual?’ Performance as a virtual event on the internet alters a number of balances that are still in place for those who only see it by going to the theatre. It modifies the production of the audience's participation in performances, by weighting their response towards the performability (rather than the performance) of the play in question, and by incorporating that participation into the play's public profile and publicity. It also changes the territory of the production space and activity by an exposure of the company's cultural and commercial space, a space that presents itself in terms of solicitation of the internet audience's engagement. But virtual performance can also constitute itself as adjacency, as theatrical critique in a mediation between Shakespeare theatre and other forms of performance. Finally, there is no simple opposition between the live and its mediated reproduction, since it is the mediatization that enables – animates – the ‘liveness’ of the actor in performance.
