Uploading Hamlet: Agency, Convergence and YouTube Shakespeare

“To Tube or not to Tube, that is the question?”, or so asks YouTube user Xelanderthomas in his upload, modifying that most instantly recognizable of Shakespearean lines to address and defend online expression and vlog (video blog) especially. “Whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of asinine comments | Or to take arms against a sea of idiots | And, by posting, end them”. There is a long history to the expropriation of Hamlet’s words. “Shakespeare sampled, Shakespeare quoted without quotation marks”, as Marjorie Garber reminds us, “has become the lingua franca of modern cultural exchange”. But our exchange with Shakespeare is increasingly experienced in and through a fluid mediascape, a mediascape that includes YouTube, the most popular videosharing platform on the web. Most students or teachers of Shakespeare will be familiar with the Shakespeare film or theatre production reappearing in clip form on YouTube. Accessing Shakespeare through such a platform might be construed as “Shakespeare-lite”, with the plays condensed to short clips, quite literally minimized by the YouTube screen, or set alongside humorous, often-ridiculous content. “What would Hamlet look like if it were performed by cats?” Cue Hamlet performed by animated talking cat-heads. This is typical of the YouTube video: “easy to get, in both senses of the word: simple-to-understand – an idea reduced to an icon or gag – while also effortless to get to: one click! … Understandable in a heartbeat, knowable without thinking, this is media already encrusted with social meaning or feeling”. This upload has over 2.9 million views, relatively small in comparison to the 1 billion view counts for pop stars like Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber, but a significant view count nonetheless