Evaluating Shakespeare: recommendations for literary scholars
Permalink for this paragraph 0 This essay set out to show that the chief effects of new media on cultural institutions are not physical (as anxious responses to the “threat to the live”, and parallel examples of its challenges to recorded music and newsprint, suggest), but come from its attendant discourse, as inflected by changing narratives of value. However, the findings of its focus on the language of cultural value might, in fact, ultimately temper the assertion of Arts Council England that digital culture currently has a limited physical effect on the way traditional institutions operate. We’ve observed in this essay their major acts of reinscription and even physical reconstruction as they strive to recapture a value that is not controlled by them; and, finally, have seen that the new language of value they adopt has permanently changed the “intrinsic” nature of the tangible objects and buildings at the core of these institutions. If value resides not in things but in the way we talk about them – if “values are the sedimental deposits of the imperative to value”[87] – then the discourse of new media does not simply offer an up-to-date alternative to an older language of intrinsic value, but permanently inflects our sense of what constitutes the “real thing”.
Permalink for this paragraph 3 This phenomenon is exaggerated in the case of Shakespeare because of the already slippery nature of the language in which his value is articulated. “Shakespeare” is at once a byword for transcendent “excellence” and “genius” and a set of Tudor artefacts; text and performance; Englishness and universality, among numerous other binaries, and these qualities are variously, and selectively, emphasized by the imperatives of education, nationhood and the cultural economy. His value is therefore difficult to connect firmly to any built organisation. The strenuous efforts of the institutions both to celebrate created value and to recoup it within their walls, and the subsequent failure of their superior claim to the “real” and authentic in a mediatized culture, ultimately expose their contingent relationship to the value of “Shakespeare”.
Permalink for this paragraph 0 This essay’s case study of key UK Shakespeare institutions gives it both useful particularity and wider significance. Firstly, by showing what a mixed set of imperatives – of public funding, business and charity, among others – shape the discourse of cultural value in which these cultural organisations work, it has ready applicability beyond the UK, in, for example, the seemingly more independent, but heterogeneous, funding systems of US cultural and educational institutions, encouraging scholars in other cultural economies to tease out the hybrid influences on their articulation of “value”. Secondly, the essay’s focus on particular institutions is an important reminder for scholars of Shakespeare and digital media that technologies don’t remediate each other – people (and institutions) do. It offers a glimpse into the intentions and deliberate decisions behind the acts of remediation that these organisations perform – followed by a revealing account of the moves they make to manage the repercussions of that remediation. Thirdly, it exposes the local and particular pressures that shape the seemingly neutral, global discourse of the Globe, RSC, SBT and BL’s online self-presentations, and reminds us that the internet is not a transparent medium for sharing a “global” Shakespeare with new audiences and nations, but a tissue of discourse that continually rearticulates and reshapes the value of “Shakespeare”.
Permalink for this paragraph 4 Every new language, then, has the capacity to change permanently the value of “Shakespeare”. For scholars of Shakespeare and new media, this realisation might lend a new sense of urgency to the need to turn their attention from analysing only what Shakespeare might “mean” in different, unfamiliar media, to performing a more evaluative critical role. With new awareness of the multiple, complex influences on their narratives of cultural value, Shakespeare scholars, and literary critics more generally, are well placed to decode the discourses in which they are asked to show the importance the value of what they, and other Shakespeare-based organisations, do; and to see what is at stake in their use. In doing so, they can avoid ricocheting back and forth between an unthinking embrace of the latest, uninspected terms of value (“creativity”, “experience”) and a panicked resort to older ones (“objects”, “intrinsic”): veering between extremes of technophobia or technophilia; or, to invoke a current value crisis in UK humanities higher education, resorting defiantly to the “intrinsic” value of research in the face of the demands of the government’s Research Excellence Framework assessment to show the “impact” of that research in the wider world. Instead, scholars might be encouraged to devote more careful attention to reading the language of value that comes with any new medium for Shakespeare; to recognize that Shakespeare’s value is not merely a pre-existing quality conveyed by Shakespeare organisations, but something fluid that is endlessly inflected by the value narratives of institutions, policy, markets and technologies; and to work together with other Shakespeare institutions to create a more nuanced, balanced language for articulating the value of Shakespeare, and culture, in future.
Permalink for this paragraph 6 General comments on this essay may be linked to this page.
Permalink for this paragraph 3 Acknowledgements: I am grateful to the London Shakespeare Seminar, to Kate McLuskie and the “Interrogating Cultural Value” team, to staff and students of the Shakespeare Institute, to Christie Carson, and to Katherine Rowe, for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.
michaeldobson
mkozusko
katerumbold
andrewmurphy
garrettsullivan
There is an anecdote about Euripides. One of his competitors is supposed to have said “my plays will be remembered when yours are forgotten.” Euripides answered “yes, but not until then.”
Where does value come from? “What’s aught as ’tis valued?” Troilus asks, and it might have been a good idea for this essay to cite this passage somewhere. Is value recognized or created by others? A poet is a maker, but poets make it by being made through the approval given by others to the poems they have made. There may be chicken and egg problems here that are impossible to figure out. I have some trouble with the idea that “Shakespeare’s value is not merely a pre-eixsting quality conveyed by Shakespeare organization, but something fluid that is endless inflected by the value narratives of institutions, policy, markets, and technologies.” Substitute Chopin or Schumann for Shakespeare as composers with very distinct voices. If there is no pre-existing could the different value narratives lead us to confuse one with the other? Or are there bundles of properties in those compositions that put a limit on those inflections. Of course, “not merely” and “inflected” are big wiggle words here. You cannot inflect what is not there in the first place, and “not merely” goes in the same direction.
How important is the digital in all this? There has been a big change in my life in the relations between cultural icons and their audience. In the old days (in the room the women come and go talking of Michelangelo) you enhance your value by admiring or pretending to admire works of high culture. The One is admired by the Many and sits in some timeless space. Moving away from that model was a big part of the sixties and seventies. In the rhetoric of empowerment and democratic equality there is no room for Great Men –witness the iconic everyman super achievers that Ronald Reagan liked to salute in his State of the Union addresses. Did digital technology create a participatory and interactive climate or did it just buy into the Zeitgeist? I think the second is more plausible.
Thank you very much for your rich and helpful comment.
You’re right that “what’s aught but as ’tis valued” resonates with the essay’s question of when value is supposed to happen. Other scholars have used the phrase as a jumping off point for considerations of, for example, the economic, or of scepticism, in Shakespeare’s plays themselves, and it might be a useful point of reference here, too (with due caution about invoking Shakespeare as a prescient authority figure on the matter – itself an intriguing value construction…).
On your question about value being recognized or created, and particularly the chicken and egg problem of poems being made through the process of approval, Bourdieu’s idea of the ‘field of cultural production’, and the work of more recent critics of cultural industries on the conditions that shape the inception of a work, are relevant here. Cultural value might be seen to shape a work, as much as to be recognised in it, or to be produced on subsequent contact with it. That ‘field’ is of course different for a Shakespeare and a Chopin.
Which links crucially to your next point: thanks for spotting that ’inflected’ and ‘not merely’ are pulling in the same direction. I hesitated to say ‘produced’ instead of ‘inflected’, because, of course, all twenty-first century institutions are dealing, if not with the originary value of a fixed object called ‘Shakespeare’, then with the myriad prior interpretations, performances, and valuations of Shakespeare that precede their present-day work. I’ll be pleased to make this point in a later version.
As for the zeitgeist of democracy and participation: yes, I think you’re right. As I hope I’ve made clear in the essay, digital technology is not itself responsible for the changes in the way these institutions operate (not least because, as I pointed out, technology doesn’t remediate - people do). More pervasive is the discourse that attends that technology – a discourse that seems to hold out the promise of a participatory culture. The larger question of whether that promise, is, or was ever, more than a utopian ideal, remains to be discussed. Thanks again for your comments.
I am afraid that I found this conclusion a bit too nebulous in terms of what evaluative work literary scholars are supposed to be doing here. The delineation of the potential usefulness of your analysis is very strong; however, I am not sure where we are supposed to create “the more nuanced, balanced language for articulating the value of Shakespeare, and culture, in future.” Of course, there is also the question of who decides what is balanced!
I agree with leosborn’s comment above: the conclusion weakly defines the role of literary scholars here: “With new awareness of the multiple, complex influences on their narratives of cultural value, Shakespeare scholars, and literary critics more generally, are well placed to decode the discourses in which they are asked to show the importance the value of what they, and other Shakespeare-based organisations, do; and to see what is at stake in their use.”
one might wonder why our judgments should be valued any more than that of the 15 years old kid who turned dr. who into an admirer. this links to mueller’s comment, too, about democratization.
Thanks, both: I hope my response to Michael Dobson’s comment, below, goes some way to showing how, and with whom, scholars might discuss the language in which they are asked to articulate the value of their work.
In addition, it’s one of the general concerns of my essay that the tendency of studies of Shakespeare and new media can sometimes be to analyse what Shakespeare ‘means’ in a new arena, rather than to assess what kind of values are at stake. I’ll be pleased to foreground this, and explain further what an evaluative role might mean, in the final version of the conclusion.