Adapting media

As was seen in the context of stagings of Hamlet presented by Lepage and Warchus, means and styles of production that challenge one’s assumptions about the medium of transmission can provoke a crisis of work recognition. If one’s idea of Shakespearean theatre is technologically minimalist, essentially defined by ‘two planks and a passion’, then a staging such as Lepage’s that relies heavily on ‘computerised sets and electronic wonders’ will seem, at best, far from the heart of what one considers the authentic work. ¹ One might even choose to insist that a category shift has been effected, and that this is not an instance of the work at all, but something new, perhaps an adaptation. Alternatively, and especially as distinctions among performance media continue to blur, such features of production might come to seem, or might already seem to others, unremarkable, this adjustment of expectations permitting innovation to be folded into an evolving consensus about the supposed essence of the work. ² Parallel technological developments have likewise confronted production of the work in the textual instance, especially with regard to the continued expansion of electronic editing and the internet. ³ Curiously, however, far from generating controversy and anxiety about what should count as a genuine textual instance of the work, humanities computing has more often been embraced as providing improved access to the work. ⁴ While my larger argument is that there is no fixed work to which one can gain access, what seems certain is that as capabilities such as full-text searching and on-screen facsimile reproduction become increasingly ordinary (to note just two of the more common applications of electronic text), the potential for such technology to influence a pragmatic conception of the work is enhanced.