ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that fan audiences offer opportunities to rethink audience studies, because engagement is defined by participation rather than attendance. The shift to Web 2.0, this chapter contends, has created asynchronous audiences who not only define theater as an intertextual experience, but reimagine it through speculative participation, based equally on lived experience and imagined theaters. These imagined theaters coalesce to generate new Shakespearean microperformances, and the material traces that these performances leave offer scholars and artists new opportunities to understand twenty-first-century theater audiences.
