ABSTRACT
Global Shakespeares is rooted in the work of the MIT Shakespeare Project, an electronic research hub founded by Peter S. Donaldson in 1992. Global Shakespeares continues the MIT Shakespeare Project's traditional focus on tools for teaching. A collection of blog posts, interviews and short essays from the project's editors shows the possible interpretive uses to which the archive can be put and, in some cases, relates the material to current events, highlighting the significance of Shakespeare performance to understanding contemporary global media phenomena such as the London 2012 Olympics. While Global Shakespeares gives a sense of how aesthetically and socially capacious Shakespeare's works are—especially as visual, performative art forms—the concept of a canonical text is largely absent from the project. Whereas Hamlet on the Ramparts anchored multimedia materials to lines of a particular edition of an individual play, Global Shakespeares focuses on the film or recorded performance, with supplemental texts, like reviews, revolving around the production.
