ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the Sonnets on YouTube as a case study of the possibilities and also limitations of the platform for engaging with Shakespeare. Shakespearean texts are increasingly being experienced through digital technologies. YouTube is the most popular video-sharing platform on the web and, for Shakespeareans, should now be regarded as an important, open-access resource. The genres of do-it-yourself Shakespeare on YouTube offer exciting opportunities for students of the plays and poems and for our field more generally, signalling new forms of engagement, participation and response. However, the culture of YouTube poses several challenges to the scholarly analysis of Shakespeare and the implications for the reception of the texts are only beginning to be essayed. For texts whose putative transcendence is hard to shake off, the anxious desire to write out anything queer in or about the poems reminds us that heteronormativity has a history, a textual trace.
