ABSTRACT
Scratch effects were developed by independent video artists during early 1980s, and have attained broadcast status because of their incorporation into sharp adverts and pop promos, as well as through the hilariously disrupted speech patterns of a mega-personality like Max Headroom. Shakespeare is another hugely expensive multinational product, imbricated in many different kinds of complex structure: the tourist industry, broadcast entertainment industry, the National Curriculum, and then more diffusely in a variety of kinds of discourse: the languages of cultural value, heritage, spiritual insight. Video materials for teaching Shakespeare already exist in growing profusion but by and large they offer a conventional window-on-the-world programme treatment of their subject, and very few incorporate what we may term the Scratcher’s Perspective, that is an active sense of the interaction of late twentieth-century electronic format and early modern dramatic pre-text. Shakespeare’s plays confine their womenfolk closely, the parts are notoriously underwritten, so that the symbolic females become the mute focus of intense attentions.
