ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the varied output of a community of Shakespeare and television fans called The Hollow Crown Fans. A multiplatform group founded in 2012, the Fans were initially motivated by their shared admiration for the British Broadcasting Corporation’s adaptation of Shakespeare's Henriad plays of the same name. Although adaptation typically occurs on a much larger scale, the examples in the chapter deals with the nature of both fan labour and fan texts, as identified by figures such as Jenkins, Matt Hills, Jonathan Gray, and Cornell Sandvoss. Digital Shakespeare, however, is also the cause of potential anxiety in the field of literary studies. Jenni Ramone's criticism of digital texts, for instance, belies a fear that "the text is shaped by its users and authorship is only an optional field of attention". Social media offers performative spaces in which individuals' identities, along with brands, adaptive texts, or authors like Shakespeare are renegotiated and redefined on macro- and microscales.
