From “Access” to “Creativity”: Shakespeare Institutions, New Media and the Language of Cultural Value
Kate Rumbold
The Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-upon-Avon
¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 0 Abstract
¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 0 This essay examines the appropriation of new media by UK Shakespeare institutions. It argues that a significant effect of their online self-presentation is not to alter the way people consume “Shakespeare”, but to inflect his cultural value. The positive discourse of digital technology – “interactivity”, “participation”, “creativity” – is inflected by the policy and business imperatives that shape the work of cultural organisations. UK cultural policy has shifted from promoting “access” to culture, to encouraging “participation” and increasingly, fostering “creativity” in visitors, while business discourse increasingly focuses on marketing the user experience. These changing narratives relocate value from something residing intrinsically in an object at the center of an institution to something created during, or after, a visitor encounter. Institutions founded as gatekeepers of culture are thus recast as facilitators of value creation. The essay traces the double maneuvers by which Shakespeare institutions celebrate their value-generating potential but also strive to capture and reinscribe value within their walls. It detects, within their innovative engagements with “experience” and “creativity”, a tendency to resort to the intrinsic value of objects; it reveals that this older language of value is permanently inflected by new media. It concludes by proposing a newly evaluative role for Shakespeare scholars.
My larger question about this argument has to do with the intrinsic value of Shakespeare as “an object at the center of an institution” when Shakespeare and Shakespearean performance are only imperfectly confined as just objects. Moreover, the nostalgia for the stable intrinsic value of art seems to me just as problematic as new value created during or after a visitor encounter. How old is the “older language of value” as it pertains to Shakespeare? The new value seems to me much easier to identify and delimit (those sections of this paper are fascinating!). At the same time, neither old nor new “value” seems that stable to me, particularly given the unclear status of Shakespeare as a stable object. Consider also that the U.K. rhetoric of determined creativity validates that term over the “outcomes and assessments” language that now pervades the U.S. institutions of learning and culture. However, I am intrigued by the “newly evaluative role” that the essay will propose–identifying the scholar or academic as the arbiter/analyst of value could certainly appeal, but I will need a clear sense of what authorizes that kind of evaluative role over any others.
You draw attention here and in several of your later comments to a point that’s absolutely central to the essay, so thank you for the opportunity to foreground it here.
My ultimate point is precisely that, as you say, ’Shakespeare and Shakespearean performance are only imperfectly confined as just objects’, and that nostalgia for the stable intrinsic value of art is problematic. I set out not to deplore the loss of a once-stable intrinsic value but to track institutional behaviour as discourses of cultural value change, and, by doing so, to show how problematic institutional claims to the value of Shakespeare have always been.
Specifically, the ‘older language of value’ refers here to the originary claims of many of these institutions to preserve, promote, and even embody Shakespeare (and thanks to your helpful comments I’ll be including more details of these in the final version of the essay). Their intrinsic-sounding assertions of value were connected to the challenge of yoking ‘Shakespeare’ (text? performance? individual?) to a building-based institution in a particular physical space.
Digital technology, enlisted to promote the building-based work of these organisations, reinvigorates the ongoing challenge of, as Diana Owen, Director of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust put it, ‘getting your arms round Shakespeare’. The renewed emphasis I later observe in these institutions on Shakespeare-related objects can be read as an attempt to anchor a nebulous ‘Shakespeare’ in the seemingly stable value of the artefact.
It’s this fluidity of value, the basis of ‘intrinsic’ or other kinds of value in linguistic acts of evaluation, that makes literary scholars well placed to perform this kind of analytical work – not only for external institutions, but for themselves, as the terms in which the value of research and teaching are articulated continue to shift.