Alien Shakespeares 2.0

Shakespeareans have begun to study the bard in New Media, and a smaller group studies Shakespearean texts from the perspective of Digital Humanities research. However, these disciplinary divisions, with their varying theoretical perspectives, prevent us from seeing useful commonalities between these two domains of digital Shakespeare. This essay seeks to begin the conversation of examining digital Shakespeare as a general category under the theoretical umbrella of Ian Bogost’s “alien phenomenology,” which regards objects of all kinds – concrete and abstract, “real” and imaginary – as existing equally, or as having a comparable ontological status. The theory insists at once on the autonomy and integrity of objects or units and on the ubiquitous enfolding of systems, and therefore of relationships, both within and beyond objects. Bogost’s principal metaphor for what he calls not merely a “flat ontology” but a “tiny ontology,” is the black hole, which is at once an infinitely dense point and an enfolded form of an entire universe. Following alien phenomenology in examples from YouTube, the searchable Folger Digital Texts, the Shakespeare in Quarto Archive, and both the Luminary and Shakespeare in Bits apps, the essay suggests how both persons and texts are units or objects imbricated in a system, or even tangle, of relationships that make up digital Shakespeare’s systems of meaning. The essay concludes by suggesting that the investigation of alien phenomenology in digital Shakespeare artifacts both counteracts erroneous assumptions about the transparency and “relatability” of applications dedicated to Shakespeare and stresses the importance of recognizing a wide range of agents at play in digital Shakespeare.