ABSTRACT
Three decades of destabilizing developments in Shakespeare studies, theatre and performance studies, theatre history and historiography, and dissemination technologies remain largely unacknowledged in the print-based editorial conventions of most editions of Shakespeare's works. Performances are processual editions liberated from incarceration in the ivory tower. The consequence of Magelssen's argument for editing Shakespeare is this: digital performance editions must provide ways to perpetuate an active performance tradition in order to preserve it. Our Richard III is virtual environment in which editor-performers can create their own virtual performances. Perhaps the most significant affordance of a digital performance edition is opportunity to empower users as creators, dissolving the researcher-audience binary even more completely than performance can. Along with an iterative, user-generated, multidimensional edition of a work by major playwright that takes production records related to anonymous, inter-performative analogue as its copy-text, our digital performance edition also offers a tutorial video explaining how to make a digital performance edition in our editorial platform.
