Memes, Screens and Broadway Scenes: Popular Culture Representations of Shakespeare’s Actors in the Age of Participatory Media

Abstract

In a recent Broadway musical featuring William Shakespeare, the actor and poet tells his audience, through song, "I've got many fans with so many demands / I can hardly go take a piss [...] / Be it theatre freak or the autograph-seeker / They all want a piece of this." 1 It is notable that representations of Shakespeare in popular culture have multiplied since the rise of participatory media. Shakespeare on Twitter (@Shakespeare) has more than 40,000 followers, while William Shakespeare (@WilliamShakespeareAuthor) on Facebook has over 16 million "likes". Shakespeare memes proliferate on social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and Reddit and there are tens of thousands of Shakespeare fanfictions to be found online. The rise of these types of participatory media platforms has not only given us new outlets for artistic expression, as well as new ways to create and disseminate cultural artefacts, it has also given us new ways of theorising Shakespeare. Today, we can construct our own Shakespeares and disseminate them globally, an example of what Jennifer Holl terms "YouShakespeare," where "online Shakespeares speak not only the poet's verse, but as the poet himself ." 2 In this, we can see Shakespeare as meme. Richard Dawkins originally proposed meme theory in the 1970s, when theorising about how genes replicate; he suggested an alternative to DNA that he called memes, things that behave like a gene in human culture, which can replicate. 3 According to Mike Ingham, within popular culture and participatory media, "A meme spreads and [...] transforms itself in accordance with the conditions of the new habitat in order to survive." 4 Shakespeare Memes, Screens and Broadway Scenes: Popular Culture Representations of Shakes... Actes des congrès de la Société française Shakespeare | 2021 médias participatifs.