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Immersive Shakespeare: locating early modern immersion in contemporary adaptations

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Immersive Shakespeare:
Locating Early Modern Immersion in Contemporary Adaptations

by

Anne Elizabeth Sullivan

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
ENGLISH

December 2022

Copyright 2022 Anne Elizabeth Sullivan

ii

Full fathom five thy father lies,
Of his bones are coral made,
Those are pearls that were his eyes,
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change,
Into something rich and strange.

--William Shakespeare, The Tempest (1.2. 400-405)

iii
Acknowledgements
Returning to school has been one of the most fulfilling experiences of my life, and there
are many mentors, colleagues, friends, and family who have encouraged and inspired me along
the way.
The University of Southern California has been a fount of generosity. In the Department
of English, I want to especially thank Flora Ruiz, Javier Franco and Jeanne Weiss who could
always solve any problem that arose with speed, grace, and kindness. Thank you to my directors
of graduate studies, Emily Anderson and Meg Russett. Emily has offered me so much sage
advice about both my research project and how to juggle academia and motherhood. Meg
secured me not one but two rounds of parental leave without which completing my academic
work would have been nearly impossible. And thank you to Peter Mancall and Amy Braden for
supporting me as a USC Mellon Digital Humanities Fellow. Earning the fellowship amplified
every aspect of my experience as a doctoral student. Thank you.
Infinite thanks to my wonderful committee: Bruce Smith, Alice Gambrell, and Peter
Mancall who have all supported me from the moment I met each one of them. Bruce inspires me
to be creative, to be curious and, most of all, to be joyful in my research. Alice is everything I
could have asked for in an advisor--she is gracious, supportive, inquisitive, and keeps it real.
Peter has been my guiding force to think big and think wide about life after academia, and it was
always a delight to bump into him at the Huntington Library.
So many other mentors have supported me along the way. Heather James is the reason I
was accepted to USC, and I will always cherish talking about Ovid and early modern literature
with her over al fresco dinners. Rebecca Lemon has not only inspired my early modern research
methodologies, but she is especially a role model for how to be an excellent educator and a

iv
warm, wonderful human; my time working with Rebecca as a research and teaching assistant
was invaluable. Virginia Kuhn consistently urged me out of my comfort levels and gave me the
opportunity to publish my first academic work. Joe Boone helped me whip this project into shape
during his prospectus course at his beautiful home, and Joe also clued me in that academic work
can be done glamorously in Italy. And finally, without Alexa Alice Joubin, I would never have
left my career in my mid-thirties to pursue academic work. Alexa’s mentorship and friendship
has literally changed my life.
I am so grateful for the friends I’ve made at USC. To my early modern writing group,
Megan Herrold, Amanda Ruud, and Lauren Weindling, you’ve read countless drafts and offered
keen insights (and I will never forget slurping oysters and drinking sazeracs in New Orleans with
my EM sisters). To my opt-in cohort, Sanders Bernstein, Nick Beck, and Joselyn Takacs, how
are you all so brilliant and loving? And Viola Lasmana, to echo and affirm, my counterpoint.
Thank you to my mom and dad who have always enthusiastically supported me leaving a
career to pursue my passion.
Jason: thank you for traipsing all over the world with me to see some bonkers immersive
theater, bear! Mostly, thank you for giving me space to write and showing me that I’m stronger
and more capable than I ever knew. Life with you is an adventure filled with love and joy, and
that joy has spilled into this project.
(Thanks for the furry cuddles and forest walks, Zipper!)
And finally, to my small frys, Haysie and Jamie. Meeting you has cracked my heart wide
open. I am so lucky to be your mom.

v
Table of Contents

Epigraph…………………………………………………………………………………………...ii
Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………………iii
List of Figures …………………………………………………………………………………...vii
Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………………...ix

Introduction

Immersive Shakespeare: Playing with Shakespeare……………………………….……...1

Audience Interaction, Site-Specificity and Multisensory Cues:
Immersive Theater Literature Review…………………………………………….………8

Audience Interaction……………………………………………………………..10

Site-Specificity…………………………………………………………………...13

The Polysensorial………………………………………………………………...16

Ludic Play and Liminal Spaces…………………………………………………..18
Digital Immersion………………………………………………………………………..21
Chapter Previews………………………………………………………………………...24

Chapter One ~ Prologues, Epilogues and Alehouses:
Liminal Places in Early Modern Theater Spaces…………………………………......26

Alehouses, Inns and Brothels: Liminal London…………………………………………32
“Give Me Your Hand”: Invitations for Audience Interaction in
Inductions, Prologues and Epilogues…………………………………………...………..35

Early Modern Site-Specificity:
When Fictional Characters Visit Factual London……………………………………..…40
Last Call, or Conclusion…………………………………………………………………45

vi
Chapter Two ~ Site-specificity and Fairs, Ludic Play and Bears:
Contemporary Immersion in Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair…………………...…47

“Forces of Rupture”: Site-Specificity and Ludic Play at the Hope Theater.…………….51
Haunted by the Stench of Bears………………………………………………………….56
“Ursa Major”: The Porcine, Polysensorial Pitmaster……………………………………62

Chapter Three ~ Howling with the Wolves: In-Person Immersive Adaptations of
Shakespeare……………………………………………………………………………..69

Mediatized Trag-Immersion: Ivo Von Hove’s Roman Tragedies and
Mike Pearson’s Coriolan/Us……………………………………………………………..73

Hamlet-Mobile: Shakespearean Philosophy in the City of Angels………………………78

Pay for Play: Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More……………………………………………..84

Chapter Four ~ “Wander Everywhere”: Virtually Immersive Shakespeare………………95

Predecessors of Digital Immersion: fluxus and Intermedial Adaptations of
Hamlet ……………………………………………………………………………………97

Virtual Reality Hamlet: Digital, Bodily, and Pedagogical Immersion in
Hamlet360………………………………………………………………………………101

“These Visions”: The Royal Shakespeare Company’s Virtual Midsummer
Dream………………………………………………………………………..…………107

Epilogue………………………..………………………………………………………………120

Notes……………………………………………………………………………………………127

Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………………...136

vii
List of Figures

Figure 1 Drawing of the interior of early 17
th
c. Globe Theater……………………………3

Figure 2 AGAS map of early modern Bankside……………..……………………………31

Figure 3 AGAS map of Elephant Alley……………………………………………….......41

Figure 4 Engraving of “Boar’s Head Tavern: Prince Hal, Falstaff and
Poins” by Charles Heath…………………………………………………………43

Figure 5 AGAS map of Hope Theater……………………………………………………..48

Figure 6 “Bartholomew Fair” by Thomas Rowlandson, 1807…………………………….53

Figure 7 Bearbaiting in the 16
th
century……………………………………………….….57

Figure 8 Entrance to the Drama Hotel, Shanghai………………………………………….69

Figure 9 Sign marking the Sleep No More theater, Shanghai……………………………..70

Figure 10 Still from Roman Tragedies……………………………………………………...74

Figure 11 Image from Coriolan/Us…………………………………………………………77

Figure 12 Van from Hamlet-Mobile………………………………………………………...80

Figure 13 “Break-Up Sex” scene from Hamlet-Mobile…………………………………….81

Figure 14 Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, Sleep No More…………………………………….86

Figure 15 Sleep No More branded bottle of Budweiser…………………………………….87

Figure 16 Mandarin neon sign, Sleep No More…………………………….……………….92

Figure 17 Lobby in Royal Shakespeare Company’s Dream………………………………..95

Figure 18 Marta Minujin. La Menesunda…………………………………………………..98

Figure 19 Alison Knowles. “Big Book.” …………………………………………………...99

Figure 20 Scott Shepherd in Wooster Group’s Hamlet……………………………………100

Figure 21 Annie Dorsen’s A Piece of Work……………………………………………….101

viii
Figure 22 Hamlet underwater in Hamlet 360……………………………………………...103

Figure 23 Ghost in the mirror in Hamlet 360……………………………………………...105

Figure 24 Split screen technology in Dream………………………………………………108

Figure 25 Puck and Moth in Dream……………………………………………………….110

Figure 26 Cobweb in Dream………………………………………………………………111

Figure 27 Actors from Dream in motion capture suits……………………………………112

Figure 28 The RSC’s 2016 motion captured The Tempest………………………………..113

Figure 29 Em Williams (Puck) in their mo-cap suit………………………………………113

Figure 30 “Tips for Dream” ………………………………………………………………115

Figure 31 Interactive gloworms in Dream……………………………………...…………116

ix
Abstract
Immersive Shakespeare examines the ways in which contemporary Shakespearean
adaptations use immersive tactics to spur a sea-change. Namely, how do immersive strategies
and technologies adapt the way contemporary audiences experience and respond to centuries-old
narratives? Bedrock to this research is the understanding that immersive strategies such as
audience interaction, site-specificity, and polysensorial experiences were not invented during the
recent surge of immersive plays and experiences, but rather that these strategies were likewise
integral to early modern performance.
Immersive Shakespeare contributes to existing Shakespearean and immersive theater
research by including liminal and ludic phenomena as two additional facets of immersive
storytelling. While both liminal thresholds and ludic play are present in all performance, in
immersive experiences these qualities are amplified due to the physical experience of being
immersed. Since audience members are invited inside the narrative, the threshold between reality
and fiction is experienced by and processed in the body which, I believe, not only creates space
for heightened interaction with the story but also allows audiences to establish a personal stake in
the narrative. In other words, how do liminal, ludic and immersive properties enable audiences,
early modern and contemporary alike, to play with Shakespeare?
My dissertation first explores the immersion inherent in the early modern world of
London theater, and then turns to contemporary Shakespearean adaptations that employ on-site
physical immersion and remote, digital immersion. Chapter One, “Prologues, Epilogues and
Alehouses: Liminoid Places in Liminal Early Modern Theater Spaces” takes up the early modern
practice of naming factual and familiar locales in fictional plays in prologues, epilogues, and
references to tavern culture. This naming of London locales in fictional narratives blurs the

x
threshold between fact and fiction to a degree that the liminal space of the theater bleeds out into
liminoid, heterotopic places in the city. Chapter Two, “Site-specificity and Fairs, Ludic Play and
Bears: Contemporary Immersion in Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair,” unpacks how Hope
theater was used on Saturday for theatrical productions and on Sunday for baiting bears, and how
the site, smell, and sound of blood sports haunt Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair. Chapter Three,
“Howling with the Wolves: In-Person Immersive Adaptations of Shakespeare,” compares several
contemporary Shakespearean immersive adaptations and points to ways in which these
productions uncover new ways of reading and seeing Shakespeare. Chapter Four, “‘Wander
Everywhere’: Virtually Immersive Shakespeare,” explores how remote and virtual immersion
evokes polysensorial experience, includes liveness and achieves actor-audience connection.
This project began in 2016 as a curiosity about the increasing interest in being
“immersed.” And, in 2020, the global pandemic forced many of us indoors and altered the way
that audiences experienced theatrical productions. My first few years of research, I traveled to
New York, London, Denmark and Shanghai, which was exciting and exhilarating; however,
although quieter and closer to home, my post-2020 research was enriched by the flurry of
creative activity born from sheltering at home. In my fourth chapter, I include some of the
projects that provided a sense of visceral connection during the pandemic, even remotely. These
beautiful immersive virtual and remote productions, such as the Royal Shakespeare Company’s
Dream, are also experienced inexpensively, which allows larger audiences to access these
performances. Although the pandemic was a tragedy in so many countless ways, I am grateful to
include these silver linings in my dissertation project.

1

Introduction

~
Immersive Shakespeare: Playing With Shakespeare

On an uncharacteristically muggy October night in New York, a handsome man pulled
me into a small room, kissed my forehead, and whispered “Don’t forget me.” He pressed a small
bit of cool, loamy soil into my palm while staring deep into my eyes. Of course, to kiss me he
had to remove the white mask that I was wearing; he also handed me a sword that had been
stored under a wrought-iron cot with dirty, rumpled sheets. While Manhattan is a city where
anything goes and stories of strangers meeting cute (and meeting strange) are dime a dozen, this
man was in character as Banquo and role playing that I was his son, Fleance. I had been pulled
into an intimate one-on-one experience during the immersive theater production Sleep No More,
an adaption of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth.
While there are many forms of immersive theater, the genre is defined by a site-specific,
interactive play that engages the senses and in which audience members move freely or are led
from scene to scene by an actor-guide.
1
Rather than entering a traditional theater with a
proscenium stage and seats, immersive theater takes place in an alternative space such as a
warehouse or other reclaimed building; the scenes are performed, sometimes concurrently, in
different rooms with elaborate, manipulable set design that audience members are often
encouraged to touch. And, perhaps the most radical departure from traditional theater practice,

2
immersive theater depends upon the audience, and more importantly their bodily movements, to
engage with the actors, help enact the narrative, and not just witness but create the spectacle.
My dissertation project, Immersive Shakespeare, locates elements of contemporary
immersive theater, namely audience interaction, site-specificity, and multisensory experience, in
both early modern and contemporary Shakespearean adaptations, and, in the process, illuminates
how these immersive theater practices were deeply ingrained in early modern theater culture.
Additionally, over the course of researching the keystones of immersive theater, I discovered that
most if not all immersion includes, both on- and off-stage, ludic play and attention to liminal
spaces. While both liminal thresholds and ludic play are present in all performance, in immersive
experiences these qualities are amplified due to the physical experience of being immersed.
Since audience members are invited inside the narrative, the threshold between reality and fiction
is experienced by and processed in the body which, I believe, not only creates space for
heightened interaction with the story but also allows audiences to establish a personal stake in
the narrative. All theater offers the element of ludic play happening on stage, and a stage is
considered a liminal space.
2
However, immersive theater extends the ludic activity to occur
directly between actor and audience member, and the nature of immersive performance creates
multiple liminal spaces and liminoid experiences throughout the productions. Locating
immersive early modern inheritances in contemporary productions helps me illuminate the
essential questions that drive this dissertation: what accounts for the increasing popularity of
immersive practices in both live and remote theatrical productions? Do contemporary immersive
adaptations of canonical narratives encourage new readings of the texts? And why are some of
the most successful immersive performances adaptations of Shakespearean plays? Moreover,

3
how do liminal, ludic and immersive properties enable audiences, early modern and
contemporary alike, to play with Shakespeare?
I propose that Shakespeare appeals to contemporary immersive practitioners for two key
reasons: that the experience of
attending early modern theater was in
and of itself an immersive event and
that Shakespeare is so embedded in
western culture that the narratives
provide a container in which to
explore a more experimental form of
theater. When Shakespeare wrote and
produced plays in the late 16
th
and
early 17
th
centuries, outdoor public
theaters such as the Globe could accommodate 3,000 audience members or more.
3
(Considering
that the population of London in 1600 was roughly 200,000 people, a large swath of Londoners
could be accommodated at the theater.
4
) Additionally, early modern thrust stages permitted a
degree of audience-actor interaction that differs greatly from the proscenium arch that divides the
stage space from the audience space (Fig 1). The circular, open-air theaters allowed and
encouraged attendees to process their experiences kinetically as many attendees stood, drank,
and snacked through the performances; additionally, the actors and audiences enjoyed a
heightened degree of interaction and, therefore, improvisation, as performances took place under
the oculus during daylight hours. During the English Civil War, London theaters were closed by
parliamentary order due to plays being “Spectacles of Pleasure, too commonly expressing
Figure 1: Interior of the second Globe, 1614. Hodges, C.
Walter, 1909-2004, artist. ART Box H688 no.5.4

4
lascivious Mirth and Levity,” and this closure is often called the end of Elizabethan theater.
5

When theaters reopened in 1660, the Restoration moved the theater district from the rowdy
Southbank to the posh West End, and likewise ushered in a different type of audience member as
smaller, privatized theater halls were built to accommodate 500 spectators (with analogously
more expensively priced tickets).
6
As Gabriel Egan notes, the social and kinetic components of
the public outdoor theaters,
is entirely unlike the experience of an indoor performance in a darkened
auditorium, in which the whole audience is facing approximately the same way, a
configuration that tends to atomize spectators without giving them the freedom to
find a preferred perspective. Indoor hall playing allowed greater realism at the
cost of diminishing the social occasion of a performance.”
7

Ronnie Mulryne likewise acknowledges that while the move to the darkened indoor theaters
allowed for greater attention to spectacle and realism; since “performances were candlelit,
reducing at least to some extent the shared audience-to-audience contact of the amphitheaters
and sacrificing some of the sense of inclusiveness the larger outdoor theaters made possible.”
8

The days of hobnobbing with 3,000 others from all walks of London life while taking in a play
were done. The lore of this raucous world of early modern theater is part of the reason that
Shakespearean adaptations in the immersive theater world are so appealing to practitioners and
audiences alike.
And, of course, while it isn’t necessary to have any knowledge of the early modern
theater world or of Shakespeare prior to attending a contemporary immersive performance,
Shakespearean narratives are arguably the most cited (both in and out of context) stories in the
Anglosphere. Of course, I point to the highly descriptive and sensorial language in Shakespeare’s
original texts throughout this dissertation, and one of my arguments is that the language itself is
so evocative that it can immerse the audience in another world. One of the most recognized

5
snapshots from any Shakespearean play is that of a hallucinating Lady Macbeth frantically
rubbing at her hands because she believes that they are covered in blood in Macbeth. I have
pulled all of Lady Macbeth’s lines from the scene below to illustrate the immersive quality of the
language:

Yet here's a spot. (5.1.33)

Out, damned spot! out, I say!--One: two: why,
then, 'tis time to do't.--Hell is murky!--Fie, my
lord, fie! a soldier, and afeard? What need we
fear who knows it, when none can call our power to
account?--Yet who would have thought the old man
to have had so much blood in him. (5.1.37-42)

The thane of Fife had a wife: where is she now?--
What, will these hands ne'er be clean?--No more o'
that, my lord, no more o' that: you mar all with
this starting. (5.1.44-47)

Here's the smell of the blood still: all the
perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little
hand. Oh, oh, oh! (5.1.53-55)

Wash your hands, put on your nightgown; look not so
pale.--I tell you yet again, Banquo's buried; he
cannot come out on's grave. (5.1.65-67)

To bed, to bed! there's knocking at the gate:
come, come, come, come, give me your hand. What's
done cannot be undone.--To bed, to bed, to bed! (5.1.69-72)

Intermingled with the repeated preoccupation with her guilt and her hallucinations of bloody
hands, Lady Macbeth catalogues her senses: the spots she “sees” on her hands, the “smell of the
blood” and the scent of “perfumes of Arabia,” the implied sensation of her scrubbing at her
hands and the cloth of her “nightgown,” and the sound of “knocking at the gate.” I point to these
immersive, sensorial moments from Shakespearean text in early modern plays and the

6
contemporary adaptations because, even when language is omitted, the original sensory
experience is retained. For instance, in Sleep No More, Lady Macbeth does not speak during the
“out damned spot” scene. In a dimly lit room outfitted with claw footed bathtubs filled with
water, the actor playing Lady Macbeth disrobes and begins to soak the blood off her. Alternately
laughing and sobbing, the actor scrubs at her body; when the scene is over, she gestures to the
audience to hand her a bathrobe, and she slowly wanders in a daze to her bedroom. Although
Lady Macbeth doesn’t utter a word, the vulnerability of the character from the original text is
echoed by seeing the actor’s vulnerable nude body; moreover, the beats from Shakespeare’s
language depicting the sensory experience of Lady Macbeth are likewise present in the scene in
Sleep No More: the water, the blood, the cloth.
Since a lion’s share of immersive theater productions stage adaptations, most readers
come to the play knowing at least some of the broad strokes of the story. Though Punchdrunk,
the production company that stages Sleep No More, has ventured into non-canonical adaptations,
their original line-up includes Sleep No More; The Duchess of Malfi, the Jacobean revenge
tragedy by John Webster; Edgar Allan Poe’s gothic short story, The Masque of the Red Death;
and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s tragedy, Faust.
9
Punchdrunk’s artistic director Felix Barrett
explains that he chooses “to work with classical texts because so many people already have a
relationship with them. It’s helpful to have a shared language when the audience’s experience of
the show isn’t linear.”
10
Given the non-linear formats and gestural choreography of many
immersive productions, it makes sense to use a well-known framing text to provide structure to
the play. Furthermore, the decision to adapt known narratives perhaps allows audience members
to more fully engage when seeing the stories brought to life in haptic detail that can, at times,
omit dialogue and traditional plot points. As James Frieze notes in his 2017 book on immersive

7
theater, Reframing Immersive Theater, “multi-sensory and largely non-verbal means are used to
excite our reader-agency, so that we are together involved in a kind of textual archaeology,
reviving the life buried within the text that we encounter.”
11
For instance, many Shakespearean
immersive adaptations, both in-person and remote, make huge slashes to the original early
modern language. The choice to denude productions of language can potentially give the works
more international reach as the language does not dictate the story, and these international
perspectives can only serve to enrich the canon. As Alexa Alice Joubin notes, the global reach of
Shakespeare is made possible as “Shakespeare is both daunting, thanks to centuries of
interpretive traditions, and liberating, thanks to historical distance.”
12
Joubin additionally notes
that global Shakespeare productions can shed new light on the works; she writes that
“performance styles borrowed from other cultures can help retool some plays and aid directors in
search of new values. The global is constructed through local personas and specific local
practices.”
13
I explore this in Chapter Three when I compare productions of Sleep No More in
New York and Shanghai. The Shanghainese production includes the Chinese folktale “Legend of
the White Snake” and offers a enchanted counterbalance to the dark magic of the witches in
Macbeth; additionally, the on-line fan forums originating in both the US and China contribute a
fresh (even if not scholarly) layer of wisdom to the productions when unpacking Shakespearean
references on blogs.
Ultimately, while I am making contributions to existing immersive theater and
Shakespearean research by assigning liminal, ludic and immersive properties to early modern
narratives and theater culture, my central prerogative with this dissertation is to point out how the
genre has the potential to offer new readings of Shakespeare. I believe that immersive theater is
rejuvenating the way that audiences interact with 400-year- old Shakespearean texts, and this

8
new mode of interaction is in turn breathing fresh air into how we understand classical narratives
and the culture of early modern theater.

Audience Interaction, Site-Specificity and the Polysensorial: Immersive Theater Literature
Review

To unpack the elements of contemporary immersion in Shakespeare’s early modern
theater world, I define my key terms in the following literature review: audience interaction, site-
specificity, polysensorial experience, liminal space, and ludic play. Immersive theater
scholarship is relatively young, having come to the forefront within the past decade or so; that
said, while it is tempting to describe my framing of early modern theater in contemporary terms
as anachronistic, my aim in this dissertation is to prove that these immersive theatrical qualities
were always present in Shakespeare’s early modern theater world.
Most immersive theater scholars, myself included, are also enthusiastic immersive
theater-goers. Additionally, some of the immersive scholars that I cite, namely, Mike Pearson,
Leslie Hill and Helen Paris, are performers and creators who impart their professional knowledge
in their academic research; in like manner, I have found that many immersive scholars write in a
performative register.
1
As a result, immersive theater research often includes relevant first-hand
reporting of how it feels to experience an immersive performance as an audience member. This
methodology of using first-person experience runs throughout my project as my early modern

1
A strong example of immersive research that hybridizes scholarship and performativity is Josephine Machon’s The
Punchdrunk Encyclopaedia (2018). At times more entertaining than informative, Machon’s Encyclopaedia hop-
scotches from one subject entry to another which mimics the choices participants make during an immersive
performance (reading the work on-line with hyperlinks only serves to heighten this element).

9
research likewise includes first-hand reports, such as Thomas Platter who wrote about his first-
hand accounts of visiting London theater in 1599. Scholars who write about immersive theater,
namely Adam Alston, Thomas Cartelli, James Frieze, Julie Grossman, Josephine Machon, and
WB Worthen, privilege first-hand experiences of immersive performance, extrapolating a larger
meaning of the genre from the more minute aspects of the plays such as small details of set
design, brief interactions with actors, or how a particular portion of the stage is scented. Some of
this is simply practical, as many immersive productions privilege choreography and set design
over dialogue. But also, much of the contemporary scholarship about immersive theater is
anthropological and written in the vein of Clifford Geertz as “thick description,” “interpretive...
of the flow of social discourse,” and “microscopic.”
14
Similarly, a lot of the experiential, first
person writing about immersive theater adopts performance theorist Richard Schechner’s
anthropological approach to “participant observation,” or a self-conscious point of view, which
“positions the performance studies fieldworker at a Brechtian distance, allowing for criticism,
irony, and personal commentary as well as sympathetic participation. In this active way, one
performs fieldwork.”
15
Part of this bent toward a “thick description” or “participant observation”
within the immersive theater community is in part due to the medium of immersive theater and
the ways in which audience members can get close to performers and items within the
performance space. There is something novel about being able to pick up a stack of Lady
Macbeth’s letters at Sleep No More and read the cursive script as though to peer intimately into
her mind. While I refer to the original Shakespearean text as much as possible when writing
about plays in this dissertation, many contemporary immersive productions do not publish their
scripts, so my in-the-field notes will serve a crucial role in backing up my thesis in the
forthcoming chapters.

10
One final note: a tendency that I’ve noticed within immersive theater research —and that
I strive to correct with this project-- is the propensity to define immersive theater by stating what
traditional theater lacks. I believe that this creates a misleading binary. I propose that a more
accurate way to think about immersive theater is that it is on a continuum of performance
history.

Audience Interaction
Perhaps one of the most cited texts in immersive theater research is Jacques Rancière’s
2009 book, The Emancipated Spectator. The work is an obvious literal precursor to the
immersive experience, especially as most performances do away with traditional seats; Rancière,
though not advocating for the removal of seats, argues that audiences are not passive viewers but
rather that they are engaged and activated by the spectacle unfolding before them, since “viewing
is also an action that confirms or transforms …observes, selects, compares, interprets.”
16
The
Emancipated Spectator rejects the notion that the actors are the active laborers while the
audience are passive; Rancière calls for a revival of “theatre restored to its original virtue…
where they become active participants as opposed to passive voyeurs.”
17
Perhaps most echoed
by contemporary immersive scholars and practitioners is Rancière’s belief that each individual
spectator brings meaning to the production:
[The collective power shared by spectators] is the power each of them has to
translate what she perceives in her own way, to link it to the unique intellectual
adventure that makes her similar to all the rest in as much as this adventure is not
like any other…. This capacity [for equality among strangers] is exercised
through irreducible distances; it is exercised by an unpredictable interplay of
associations and dissociations.
18

11
Rancière underscores not only the rich and fertile imagination that individuals bring to a
particular performance, but here, he also notes the elements of happenstance that create an
excitement during live audience—one can never predict who will attend and what perspective or
mood they might bring with them. Maxine Doyle, Punchdrunk’s choreographer, notes that the
nonlinear design of Sleep No More echoes the potential for coincidence or surprise within normal
daily rhythms such as when a person might “bump into a friend you haven’t seen for years or
turn a corner and witness a couple kissing passionately at a bus stop.”
19
Although each
character’s storyline and choreography is tightly constructed and repeated three times throughout
each production of Sleep No More, the choreography is designed to mimic “real life” complete
with spontaneous moments.
During contemporary immersive performance, active audience participation relies both
on, as Rancière suggests, the engagement of the spectator’s imagination and the audience’s
bodies that must actively interact with the actors in the immersed world. In addition to how the
audience interacts with the performers, immersive scholars also are interested in the ways in
which bodies interact within the performance space. As such, immersive scholars Alston, Frieze,
Machon and Gareth White cull from art critics such as Nicholas Bourriaud
20
and Claire Bishop,
21

both of whom focus on relational aesthetics and installation art. Bourriaud, who pithily states
that “art is a state of encounter,” focuses on the phenomena that occur when a spectator
encounters artwork. He asserts that art exhibitions that bring people and art together establish
“free areas, and time spans whose rhythm contrasts with those structuring everyday life, and an
inter-human commerce that differs from the ‘communciation zones’ that are imposed on us.”
22

Like Bourriaud, Bishop also emphasizes the importance of the body of the viewer when
experiencing installation art, which she defines as “a type of art into which the viewer physically

12
enters, and which is often described as ‘theatrical,’ ‘immersive’ or ‘experiential’… [installation
art] presupposes an embodied viewer whose senses of touch, smell and sound are as heightened
as their sense of vision.”
23
The concept of relational aesthetics appeals to both immersive theater
performers and scholars, as when done well, immersive theater provides encounters outside our
normal life rhythms by shifting our notions of time, space, and how we relate to others in the
same performance space.
Machon builds upon Bishop’s theory that installation art begets an “embodied viewer,”
and proposes that when attending immersive theater, the audience member experiences
“embodied engagement.” Machon describes embodied engagement occurring when “the
audience member in immersive theatre maintains the skills and desires of the audience-spectator,
yet additionally takes on the responsibility of direct involvement, closer to performer-
collaborator.”
24
Frieze adds to Machon’s definition of “embodied engagement” by including the
immersive characteristic of having audience members roam without seats
25
and Alston calls this
quality “productive participation.”
26
Alston argues that this productive participation inspires a
“thirst for feeling [that] ideally supplants torpidity” in audience members, and, as a result, the
emotional overflow or catharsis during a performance is “produced within the body and
constituted by the audience as art in dynamic relation to an immersive environment” (Alston’s
original emphasis).
27
This notion of embodied engagement is particularly useful when thinking
through how the audience member’s body figures into the physical space of the immersive set
design as well as the unfolding narrative.
A huge part of the appeal of early modern performance culture and contemporary
immersive productions is the lively engagement and interaction between audience and
performers. When examining immersive Shakespearean productions, it serves us to look more

13
closely at how the language in early modern plays established a bridge between actors and
spectators and encouraged an interactive, multi-sensory experience. As I will explore in Chapters
One and Two, the early modern audience was both given license and expected to take an
interactive role during performances; likewise, I will point to the invitations for audience
interaction in both in-person and remote, virtual immersive productions in Chapters Three and
Four.

Site-specificity
A central characteristic in immersive theater is the element of site-specificity, or a non-
traditional theater space that is often used for other events. The most basic understanding of site-
specific art is artwork created to exist in a particular space with which the piece of art has a
relationship, and “if removed from that location it loses all or a substantial part of its
meaning.”
28
Of course, many immersive theater productions do indeed travel, so this definition
for site-specific art installations is not as staunch when applied to theatrical productions. To
accommodate this alteration from the original definition, Alston proposes the term “site-
sympathetic” to describe Punchdrunk’s responsiveness to the architecture and found spaces that
house their productions.
29
While there are certainly exceptions, most immersive adaptations do
create a strong interrelationship with the site in which they are performed. Since most of my case
studies in this dissertation do interact with the building or site in which they are produced, I will
use the term site-specific.
Michel de Certeau’s theories of urban space and the stories etched into cities helps to
conceptualize the link between location and memory site-specificity in immersive works. In

14
particular, de Certeau’s chapter, “Walking in the City,” confirms this idea that individuals bring
meaning to the spaces that they inhabit:
they are walkers, Wandersmänner, whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an
urban ‘text’ they write without being able to read it. These practitioners made use
of spaces that cannot be seen…the paths that correspond in this intertwining,
unrecognized poems in which each body is an element signed by many others,
elude legibility.
30

If Rancière’s notion of the emancipated spectator paved the way for removing theater seats for
immersive theater, de Certeau’s concept of participating in creating the text with our bodies
advances the idea further. This concept of imprinting meaning and memory onto space is
applicable to early modern plays such as Twelfth Night, in which Antonio sends Sebastian to the
Elephant, a pub in the southern suburbs of London…. even though Twelfth Night is set in the
fantastical land of Ilyria. In this way, Shakespeare punctures the fictional narrative by including a
recognizable factual space in contemporaneous early modern London. As I will explore in
Chapter One, it is highly conceivable and even probable that London audiences had visited some
of these pubs and inns, thus bringing their own imaginative memories to the play.
The most evocative use of site-specificity occurs when the play is performed in a place
that was not initially intended to house theater productions. Brith Gof, a Welsh theater company
that pioneered performance on site, is art-directed by site-specificity scholar Mike Pearson and
staged performance is locales as varied as “disused factories, sand quarries, ice hockey stadiums,
railway stations, abandoned farmhouses and even deep in the forest.”
31
Pearson writes that the
interrelationship between site and performance doesn’t just provide another narrative layer to the
production, but in fact contributes to the palimpsestic nature of place: “through our passage,
movement, moments, actions, encounters, we constantly mark our material surroundings. These
are the authentic traces of the performance of everyday life… [and] our physical contact

15
constitutes an ongoing archaeological record.”
32
Pearson’s partner at Brith Gof, McLucas, coined
the notion of the “host” and the “ghost” in site-specific performance, or “the coexistence and
overlay of two basic sets of architectures, those of the extant building or what he later called the
host, that which is at site… and those of the constructed scenography or the ghost, that which is
brought to site.”
33
I explore this idea of the ghost in Chapter Two when I write about Ben
Jonson’s staging of Bartholomew Fair, which is set in London’s Smithfield Market, at the Hope
Theater—a performance site that also doubled as a place for baiting bears.
Two other researchers, Marvin Carlson and Gay McAuley likewise write about how
performance sites are haunted by previous productions and occurrences. Like Pearson and de
Certeau’s theories of imparting meaning on space, Marvin Carlson’s theories of “ghosting” in the
theater, which rely upon our ever-changing “repository of cultural memory” are particularly
useful not only to examine site-specificity in early modern and contemporary productions, but
also when parsing out early modern echoes in contemporary adaptations.
34
As Carlson notes,
even when locations have been selected primarily because they were the most
convenient or most available public space for a performance, they were
necessarily to some degree ghosted in the minds of the public that came there by
whatever psychic or semiotic role that the space played in the normal course of
events.
35

Likewise, Gay McAuley points to the ways in which the Sydney Wharf Theatre, a formerly
operable labor space in the Sydney harbor that was renovated to become a theater, contains
echoes of the wharf and the labor that took place and exemplifies ways in which “connotations of
the building’s earlier use may spill over to color in subtle ways the theatre activity.”
36
Echoing
Carlson’s notions of ghosting and McLucas’s “ghost and host” distinctions, McAuley notes that
“real places have to transform the fictions that might be enacted there… [and] the influence is
not, of course, all one way, and performance can also transform spectators' experience of place,

16
even places with which they are very familiar.”
37
For example, Kronborg castle in Helsignør,
Denmark, is the castle purported to have inspired Shakespeare to write Hamlet. The Danish
castle is not only a tantalizing imagined archive, but it is also a site of rich Hamletian theatrical
and cinematic history. Although there is no proof that Shakespeare ever visited Kronborg Castle,
he likely heard about it from groups of actors who performed there and then made their way to
England.
38
(Helsingør is anglicized to Elsinore in Shakespeare’s play.) Hamlet was first
performed in the castle in 1816 to mark the bicentenary of Shakespeare’s death with a cast
consisting of soldiers from the castle garrison, and it is a site that is haunted by mythologies and
on-site performances of Hamlet such as those starring Sir Laurence Oliver and Jude Law.
39

The Polysensorial
The various meanings of immerse, “to plunge into a liquid; to steep, to absorb; to sink
into an emotional state of mind; to baptize; to involve, to include,” give a good preview of what
takes place during an immersive performance.
40
The baptismal reference suggests that being
immersed has spiritual or transformative qualities, and the plunging and steeping connotes
bathing or being made clean. However, this etymology seems at odds with what happens when
an audience member is immersed during a performance: both early modern performance and
contemporary immersive theater contain an earthy--even filthy--materiality that is predicated on
humans engaging with and consuming the world within the theater space.
Of course, a traditional theater experience includes a mélange of senses: it might include
the sensation of a plush or hard seat, the taste of a glass of wine during intermission, or perhaps a
waft of perfume from an audience member seated nearby. This cocktail of scent, smell, and taste

17
was not foreign to an early modern experience, and I delve into the oftentimes malodorous and
sometimes delicious early modern London theater experience in Chapters One and Two: the
stench of raw sewage, battle-scarred bears, and, especially during the production of Bartholomew
Fair, the rich, savory scent of roasted pork. And, in Chapters Three and Four, I look at how
creative directors yoke performances with scent to evoke scent-memory from audience. This
tactic is not dissimilar to scenting immersive environments such as amusement parks or casinos;
as Scott Lukas notes in his book, The Immersive Worlds Handbook: Designing Theme Parks and
Consumer Spaces, “Immersive spaces are about desire – the desire of the visitor – and thus
present some of the greatest challenges to contemporary designers of themed and consumer
spaces.”
41
Lukas writes that in order to pique a visitor’s desire, they must feel like they are
included in the space:
personalization is another key feature of the use of the senses. Touch, smell, and
taste can take a guest from one state, such as boredom and disconnection, to a
completely opposite one, such as excitement and connection. In this way, the
person feels like an important part of the space, not an ancillary part.
42

Immersive set designers focus just as intently on incorporating scent, taste, and touch as they to
do visual and aural cues. Immersive performances push the boundaries of audience sensorial
experience by scenting rooms with lavender,
43
handing out umbrellas to audience members
during a rainstorm scene complete with fabricated rain that splashes on any bared skin,
44
or
offering an audience member a bottle of Gatorade while an actor fixes a busted car engine.
45

Stephen di Benedetto calls it a “scenography of the senses,” and his work probes the depths of
how tactile, olfactory and gustatorial cues in live theater have the capacity to trigger an audience
member’s memory, and, ideally “the onlooker trades this rational illusionary control for sensory
rich embodiment.”
46
Mark Blankenship has coined the term “aroma-turgy,” or the creative

18
decision to curate scent as part of a narrative. He points out that “when we smell something,
actual particles of an object enter our bodies… and if the smell provokes different associations
for different people, then that just personalizes the experience of the art even more.”
47

A key component of successfully incorporating a polysensorial experience as part of the
narrative is creating proximity; in other words, actors must be close enough to the audience
members so that actions such as offering tastes of food and drink are made possible. The
directors and performers of the UK-based production company Curious, Leslie Hill and Helen
Paris write about “the impact of space and proximity in relation to actual performances rather
than abstract or virtual notions of proximity and spectatorship.”
48
Hill and Paris are interested in
proximity, and namely in how close they need to be to the audience to create a sense of intimacy.
It is within this personal space that Hill and Paris assert that acute visual, thermal and olafactory
cues exist, and their aim is to create “the possibility rather than the actuality of closeness that
defines the close phase of personal space; the frisson of the almost but not quite intimate.”
49
Hill
and Paris note that a thrust stage can offer a “social” or “public” distance of roughly seven to ten
feet, but “personal space where acute visual, thermal and olfactory cues exist” occurs within a
range of one to four feet.
50
To introduce scent and taste into immersive theater directors must
devise ways to cross these comfort zones of human proximity which is made easier since
immersive productions use space in a fluid way. I write more about this fluidity of personal
space when I write about one-on-one immersive experiences between one actor and one audience
member in Chapter Three, specifically in the small immersive performance, Hamlet-Mobile, and
the highly coveted unmaskings that happen during Sleep No More.

19
Ludic Play and Liminal Spaces
After spending the past few years studying immersion and attending immersive theater
productions, I have found that, in addition to site-specificity, audience interaction and
polysensorial elements, ludic and liminal elements are amplified in immersive theater
performance. Because audience members not only attend immersive performance to watch but
participate in the narrative world, the physical qualities of liminal phenomena and ludic play are
brought to the forefront. In addition to the liminal qualities inherent in theatrical performances,
liminal and liminoid phenomena are relevant when thinking through site-specificity and the
flexible, haunted spaces in which immersive theater is performed; ludic play pertains to audience
interaction and the tangible, sensual nature of immersive performance. And, as I will examine
more closely in Chapter Four, both ludic play and liminal qualities are helpful when thinking
through digital affordances in augmented and virtual reality immersive productions.
In order to locate how the liminal figures into immersion, I look to cultural anthropologist
Victor Turner’s distinction between liminal and liminoid phenomena in his 2012 essay, “Liminal
to Liminoid, in Play, Flow, and Ritual: an Essay in Comparative Symbology.” Turner establishes
that theatrical performance is a liminoid event in a liminal theatrical space, thus zoning theaters
as sites of ritualistic visits that are “centrally integrated into the total social process,” and the
performance itself as a “leisure activity,” an “experimental” liminoid event “developed along the
margins.”
51
In conjunction with Turner’s work on liminality, I additionally cite Michel
Foucault’s theories of heterotopias, and how both early modern theaters and immersive
productions are heterotopic. Foucault points to art museums, cemeteries, hammams, brothels,
colonies, bars, prisons, gardens and theaters all as places that function heterotopically:
“heterotopia has the power of juxtaposing in a single real place different spaces and locations

20
that are incompatible with each other. Thus on the rectangle of its stage, the theatre alternates as
a series of places that are alien to each other.”
52

To examine how ludic play functions in immersion, I look to Johan Huizinga’s
foundational 1938 text Homo Ludens, Roland Barthes’s 1966 lecture entitled “Semiology and the
Urban,” and Gary Izzo’s 1997 book, The Art of Play: the New Genre of Interactive Theater. I
look to Homo Ludens to unpack how the element of ludic play factors into immersive
performance; in particular, I invoke his idea that play happens within a “magic circle” or world
apart from our daily reality, which certainly occurs within early modern theater spaces and
contemporary immersive productions:
the first main characteristic of play: that it is free, is in fact freedom. A second
characteristic is closely connected with this, namely, that play is not ‘ordinary’ or
‘real’ life. It is rather a stepping out of ‘real’ life into a temporary sphere of
activity with a disposition all of its own.
53

In Homo Ludens, Johan Huizinga describes this idea that ludic play is bounded not only by time
but also by space, and within that space there is the freedom to fully immerse in a new world:
The arena, the card table, the magic circle, the temple, the stage, the screen, the
tennis court, the court of justice, etc., are all in form and function play-grounds,
i.e. forbidden spots, isolated, hedged round, hallowed within which special rules
obtain. All are temporary worlds within the ordinary world, dedicated to the
performance of an act apart.
54

This notion of a protected world which encourages play is echoed by Izzo use of the Greek term,
“temenos,” or “sacred circle” as a bounded idea of how play space works: “a thing venerated and
hallowed, secured against defamation, violation, or intrusion; a special protected, and inviolate
space.”
55
(9). And, to bolster how ludic elements encourage people to “play the other,” I turn to
Barthes in Chapter Two when I posit that the location of the early modern theater district allows

21
for a particular type of ludic freedom; Barthes notes that certain urban sites offer the potential for
“subversive forces, forces of rupture, ludic forces act and meet,” and they open space for
inhabitants to “play the other.” I first locate these liminal and ludic elements in my first two
historically based chapters, and then I point to areas of ludic play and liminal spaces and
liminoid events in my chapters about in person and digital immersion.

Digital Immersion
2

The parallels between immersive and digital environments are clear: both hold immense
potentials for narrative and spatial immersion. In Hamlet on the Holodeck: the Future of
Narrative in Cyberspace, Janet Murray defines digital immersion as “the sensation of being
surrounded by a completely other reality, as different as water is from air, that takes over all of
our attention, our whole perceptual apparatus…immersion can entail a mere flooding of the mind
with sensation.”
56
Murray likens the experience of being immersed in a narrative as “digital
swimming,” or the phenomenon of being plunged into something new that creates a fresh sense
of excitement and alertness because we are forced to learn the new rules of the new world which
is akin to “learning to swim, to [doing] the things that the new environment makes possible.”
57
In
both in person immersive theater and digital immersive theater, part of the intense engagement is
being “forced to learn the new rules of the new world.”

2
In his book, Multiplying Worlds: Romanticism, Modernity, and the Emergence of Virtual Reality, Peter Otto argues
that the concept of virtual reality first emerged in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century. Otto explains
that the collision of enlightenment and Romanticism creates a hybrid effect that is the foundation for virtual reality.
Likewise, Leighton Evans’s book, The Re-Emergence of Virtual Reality, outlines how VR is not a new technological
art form from the 1990s, but rather stems from panorama and stereoscope. Although I’m not arguing that the origin
of our contemporary understanding of immersion in fact was born in the early modern period, like Otto’s retroactive
look at VR, I suggest that immersion has always been present, especially in open air theaters.

22
Given the popularity of narrative driven media such as augmented reality, virtual reality,
and video games in which consumers can actively participate and contribute to the outcome of
the story, it follows that purveyors of contemporary theater adaptations are seeking to integrate a
similar experience. A pertinent example of yoking immersion and intermediality, Sleep No More
enacts the “aesthetic idioms” of immersive video game narratives “driven by exploration and
direct interaction.”
58
Moreover, Sleep No More’s 2011 partnership with the MIT Media Lab
introduced a renewed technological approach to the production: the team technologized the
carnivalesque masks that visitors to Sleep No More wear during the show which linked onsite
participants to remote audience members who could then track the experience online.
59
As
Punchdrunk’s Peter Higgin explains, “we wanted to see if we could create an online experience
which lived up to the visceral intensity of the live show and facilitate a shared experience which
takes place in the both the performance space and a remote user’s location.”
60
Like Sleep No
More, some of the most innovative, ambitious and successful Shakespearean adaptations such as
Annie Dorsen’s A Piece of Work, Commonwealth Shakespeare Company’s Hamlet 360: Thy
Father’s Spirit, and the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Dream enhance immersive narratives
with either in-production technology or external media, such as on-line fan forums that extend
the narrative beyond the bounds of the play proper.
While I ultimately decided not to examine Play the Knave as part of my digital
immersion chapter as it is a pedagogical game rather than a performed narrative, I am indebted to
Gina Bloom’s work on interactivity and digital LARP. Play the Knave, designed by Bloom and
the University of California at Davis’ MobLab,
61
is an immersive and interactive video game/live
action role play (LARP) hybrid that allows users to select a Shakespearean scene, stage, and
avatar. The game physically places the player in the role of the actor, and, as the game has

23
largely been demonstrated in public spaces, the roles of player and spectator are frequently
exchanged.
62
Moreover, while developers designed Play the Knave as a way for players to better
appreciate Shakespeare by better understanding the “material labor of dramatic production,”
Bloom noticed that players initially moved amateurishly in exaggerated, Quintilian-like modes,
and depended not only on watching themselves as avatar but also upon the community feedback
from spectators to refine their movements.
63
Bloom suggests, in her 2018 book, Gaming the
Stage, that audience interaction is in part made possible by watching actors on stage engage in
games, and she likewise addresses the continuum of theater: “interactivity in the theater is not
derived from rhetoric about the internet and digital age, but rather about gaming originating in
the early modern period,” and she especially underscores the importance of play in interactivity,
stating that “it is the ethos of play that makes true interactivity possible, and this is as much the
case in theater as it is in games. Interactivity emerges in the theater when audiences don’t simply
consume, but play.”
64
Bloom’s work on interactivity and play helped me to examine how ludic
play emerges in digital performances like Dream; while Dream is firmly a performance and not a
game, it still sets bounded space for play and rules of the game.
Essential elements of in-person immersive theater—spatial design, engagement with
play, and a strong narrative—are likewise key components to digital immersive productions. In
his 2002 article, “Game Design as Narrative Architecture,” Henry Jenkins defines spatiality in
gaming as that of “spatial stories and environmental storytelling,” a concept which he notes is
heavily influenced by the works of Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life and Henri
Lefebvre’s The Production of Space. He asserts that spatiality heightens immersion in gaming,
and it holds true that the quality of the space likewise would heighten and audience member’s
experience during an immersive production. Ian Bogost likewise points out the other-worldliness

24
of video games in his 2011 book, How to Do Things With Videogames: “games are models of
experiences rather than textual descriptions or visual depictions of them,’ and that “videogames
are a medium that lets us play a role within the constraints of a model world.”
65
As such, the
inheritances from video games in immersive theater productions are well-documented by
Rosemary Klich in her 2017 chapter, “Playing a Punchdrunk Game: Immersive Theatre and
Videogaming.” Klich writes that,
like a VR-based videogame, Punchdrunk’s immersive theatre encloses audience-
participants within an alternate reality that operates under a unique system of
rules… Game rules are the basis of establishing ludic immersion and determine
the player’s interaction with the world of the game. In immersive theatre, they set
the game world apart from the everyday and establish it as a liminal space.
66

It bears pointing out that since virtual reality lacks physical space, which puts it at odds with
theater as a liminal, physical space. However, as I argue in Chapter Four, Hamlet 360:Thy
Father’s Spirit and Dream both inhabit liminal spaces, even if virtual: Hamlet 360:Thy Father’s
Spirit was filmed in virtual reality on a dilapidated theater stage in an “abandoned Vaudeville
theater on Staten Island,” and Dream teases at the “betwixt and between” by using direct address
to the audience during the performance.
67

Furthermore, I vouch for the cathartic emotional release possible during virtual and
remote digital immersion. When I attended the Royal Shakespeare Company’s remote adaptation
of Dream with a live audience during the pandemic, I truly felt elated to be watching a
performance along with other humans who were scattered across the world. Although it might be
tempting to value in-person immersion over digital immersion, I will strive to prove that both
types of immersive performance are emotionally impactful and gratifying.

25
Chapter Previews
Immersive Shakespeare is comprised of two historical chapters that point to elements of
immersion in early modern productions, and two chapters examining in-person and digital
immersion in contemporary Shakespearean adaptations. Chapter One, “Prologues, Epilogues and
Alehouses: Liminoid Places in Liminal Early Modern Theater Spaces” takes up the early modern
practice of naming factual and familiar locales in fictional plays in prologues, epilogues, and
references to tavern culture. This naming of London locales in fictional narratives blurs the
threshold between fact and fiction to a degree that the liminal space of the theater bleeds out into
liminoid, heterotopic places in the city. Chapter Two, “Site-specificity and Fairs, Ludic Play and
Bears: Contemporary Immersion in Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair,” unpacks how Hope
theater was used on Saturday for theatrical productions and on Sunday for baiting bears, and how
the site, smell, and sound of blood sports haunt Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair. Chapter Three,
“Howling with the Wolves: In-Person Immersive Adaptations of Shakespeare,” compares several
contemporary Shakespearean immersive adaptations and points to ways in which these
productions uncover new ways of reading and seeing Shakespeare. Chapter Four, “‘Wander
Everywhere’: Virtually Immersive Shakespeare,” explores how remote and virtual immersion
evokes polysensorial experience, includes liveness and achieves actor-audience connection. I
additionally examine pedagogical potentials of digital performance in productions by the
Commonwealth Shakespeare Company’s Hamlet 360: Thy Father’s Spirit, a virtual reality
Hamlet, and the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Dream, an augmented reality, interactive
adaptation of Midsummer Night’s Dream.

26

Chapter One
~

Prologues, Epilogues and Alehouses:
Liminal Places in Early Modern Theater Spaces

One works at the liminal,
one plays with the liminoid.
~Victor Turner

When early modern audiences attended large-scale, outdoor theater performances, they
crossed the Thames and entered the bawdy atmosphere of the Southbank. A roving, rollicking
world, theatergoers parsed their way past alehouses, cockfights, and brothels, thereby framing
the theater district of London as an experience to be entered at one’s own peril or pleasure.
Moreover, each of these experiences, whether designed to entertain with performance, gambling,
or blood sport; enjoy rich food and strong drink; or indulge in sensual pleasures, takes place
along the margins of the city in heterotopic and liminoid spaces.
1
While many of Shakespeare’s
plays are set in locales that would have been wildly foreign to the average London theatergoer,
he and other early modernists GeoTag their performance site through references to locales
adjacent to early modern theater districts. Though I use the term here anachronistically, an “item
of metadata which assigns a geographical location to a digital photograph or other item of digital
content” is largely used on social media so people can mark their presence in a particular spot to
remember the experience, humble-brag or find affinity with others who have also been there.
2

Shakespeare likewise peppered his narratives with GeoTags to actual taverns and brothels,

27
convivial spaces similar to public outdoor early modern theaters, so his audiences could find
affinity with characters in his plays and likewise a deeper sense of immersion in the narrative.
The theater district of early modern London, was, as evidenced by the spatial and
geographical research by Susan Bennett, Jean E. Howard and Julie Sanders, an integral part of
forming the identity of 17
th
century London. In her 2007 book, Theater of a City: The Places of
London Comedy, 1598-1642, Howard draws from Michel de Certeau’s theories of urban space
and the stories etched into cities. In particular, de Certeau’s chapter, “Walking in the City,”
forwards the idea that individuals bring meaning to the spaces that they inhabit “as walkers,
Wandersmänner, whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban ‘text’ they write without
being able to read it.”
3
Howard advances de Certeau’s notion of urban space in early modern
London and writes,
through their place-based dramatic narratives, playwrights helped
representationally to construct the practices associated with specific urban spaces,
directing audiences to the uses to which city spaces could be put and to the
privileged modes of conduct and the cultural competencies associated with
each… Through its fictions drama helped less to transcribe than to construct and
interpret the city.
4

Howard’s point that both theater and the city of London reinforced identities is likewise explored
by Sanders her 2011 book, The Cultural Geography of Early Modern Drama, 1620–1650.
Sanders cites the Thames as a crucial—and polysensorial-- focal point of the London landscape:
Londoners and visitors to the capital would have regularly come into sight, smell,
and sound of the Thames… Not only was the river a focal point in terms of
activity – trade and transportation were hugely dependent on it – and a major sight
on anyone’s journey through London, but the sonic, olfactory, and haptic, as well
as optic, experience of it would have struck the imagination forcefully.
5

Moreover, since the public theaters resided across the Thames from the City of London, the river
has become a liminal touchstone for how audiences crossed to see theatrical performances;

28
Sanders explains that “theatre and performance were woven deep into the contemporary psyche
and, not least, the experience of specific spaces and places like the Bankside.”
6
And Susan
Bennett likewise emphasizes the potentials for fictional narratives on-stage to contribute to the
formation of place off-stage; in her 2016 article, “Space into Place,” Bennett writes “Theatrical
performance, in this way, converts the space of a stage into a place richly invested with meaning,
an act that contributes to the production of identity not only of those characters in the drama but
for the audience, individually and collectively, as well as for those communities that live in close
proximity.”
7

The public outdoor theaters in early modern London were considered sites where visitors
from all walks of life could release tension and cavort, so it follows that playhouses were noisy,
raucous places. Thomas Platter, in 1599, paints a rich scene of attending a production at an
outdoor theater; he writes,
Thus daily at two in the afternoon, London has two, sometimes three plays
running in different places, competing with each other, and those which play best
obtain most spectators. The playhouses are so constructed that they play on a
raised platform, so that everyone has a good view. There are different galleries
and places, however, where the seating is better and more comfortable and
therefore more expensive…. And during the performance food and drink are
carried round the audience, so that for what one cares to pay one may also have
refreshment.
8

Playhouses such as the Theatre, the Curtain or the Globe could accommodate an astonishing
3,000 attendees.
9
As Farah Karim-Cooper details in her chapter, “Touch and Taste in
Shakespeare’s Theatres,” “to be audience in those theatres meant to be jostled, shoved and
pressed.”
10
Additionally, Karim-Cooper describes early modern theaters as sites of synesthesia,
where “the idea that music can ‘tickle’ the ear, apparel ‘flatter’ the eye and speech ‘whet desire’
for sex, suggests that the early moderns did not think of the senses as singularly functional;
rather, all of the senses were mutually receptive to touch, taste, sound, smell and sight.”
11
And,

29
as Platter, audiences could enjoy a wide variety of food and drink throughout performances.
Rebecca Lemon, in her richly descriptive 2012 article for Lapham’s Quarterly, “Player’s Club,”
details the array of fare available:
the audience enjoys a feast of oysters, crabs, mussels, periwinkles, and cockles;
some nibble on walnuts, hazelnuts, plums, cherries, peaches, dried raisins, or figs.
But more than snacking, this audience joins Falstaff in drinking heavily, ordering
up their ale and wine straight through the performance and the intermission. All
playhouses have liquor on- site, and The Curtain is no exception…. The
distractions were many, not only from drunk patrons themselves: ale produced a
hissing noise when tapped, and those opening it were shouted down by audience
members annoyed by the sound.
12

Hissing was a fearsome noise for a playwright, as audience members who rejected the play also
hissed to demonstrate their dislike, so “it was a standard theater joke that a nervous playwright
could not distinguish between the opening of bottled ale and a hiss.”
13
Platter also includes
details about the lively and convivial tavern culture in his travelogue, writing that “there are a
great many inns, taverns, and beer-gardens scattered about the city, where much amusement may
be had with eating, drinking, fiddling, and the rest, as for instance in our hostelry, which was
visited by players almost daily.”
14
The playhouse behaviors of chatting, smoking, snacking and
drinking during performances mirrors the social lubrication that occurred in taverns, inns and
alehouses.
15

In addition to crossing a geographical threshold such as the Thames, a stage is a liminal
space. As performance theorist Richard Schechner writes in Performance Studies,
the front frame of a proscenium stage, from the forestage to a few feet behind the
curtain, is a limen connecting the imaginary worlds performed onstage to the
daily lives of spectators in the house. The house is permanently decorated, while
the stage is often fully dressed in settings indicating specific times and places. But
most of the world’s stages are empty spaces, to use Peter Brook’s phrase. An

30
empty theatre space is liminal, open to all kinds of possibilities: a space that by
means of performing could become anywhere.
16

As such, Shakespeare and other early modernists were attuned not only to the transformative
liminal qualities of the theater architecture, but also to the liminal thresholds of the prologues and
epilogues that bookend the plays. Two framing texts, Christopher Sly’s Induction in Taming of
the Shrew and Rosalind’s closing epilogue in As You Like It, further toy with the location of
open-air theaters by invoking heterotopic alehouses and taverns. These inclusions not only serve
to welcome audience members into the fantasy world of Italy and continue the wedding
celebration out of the idyllic Arden Forest, respectively, but also these references would have
reminded audiences of the tavern culture existing within and just outside the theater. This
concept of imprinting the meaning and purpose of urban space onto narratives helps to reaffirm
both factual locations and the fictional narratives that contain these places. For example,
Shakespeare inserts contemporaneous London taverns and brothels into the fictional narratives of
Tweflth Night’s Ilyria and the historical Henriad plays, specifically Henry IV Parts 1 and 2;
specifically, the Elephant, a street in a tawdry part of South London appears in Twelfth Night,
and the Boar’s Head Tavern in Eastcheap is frequented by Falstaff, the sozzled, scarfing knight
from Henry IV Part I, Henry IV Part 2, and The Merry Wives of Windsor. (Fig 2).

31

Numerous transformations and plot twists occur in Shakespearean plays because of
drunkenness: Iago devises a scheme in which he urges Othello’s loyal solider Cassio to drink in
Othello so he can frame Cassio as Desdemona’s lover; Borachio is the drunk pawn in Much Ado
About Nothing who causes Claudio to question Hero’s integrity; and, in The Tempest, Stephano
and Trincolo give Caliban his first taste of liquor and establish an unlikely trio to plot conspiracy
against Propsero. That said, this chapter is primarily focused on early modern tavern tableaux
and references to sites of alcohol consumption that mirror real places surrounding the early
modern London theater district; namely I’m curious about how these inclusions created an
immersive environment and invited audience members to envision themselves in the narrative.
Most audience members would likewise have been familiar with visiting heterotopic, liminoid
places such as alehouses and the accompanying psychoactive transformative nature of taking
alcohol; I believe that references to real bars and brothels would not only evoke convivial tavern
cheer but also echo the rowdy immersive experiences that took place in the “betwixt and
between” of early modern theaters.
17
Moreover, this “betwixt and between” practice of including
sites for drinking and eating within theaters continues in contemporary lobbies today. In the case
Figure 2: Screenshot of the AGAS Map of Early Modern London, marking the sites of the Globe theater and the
Boar’s Head Tavern. This map was edited by Janelle Jenstad at the U of Victoria, June 20
th
, 2018.

32
of immersive theater, implanted speakeasies and play-themed watering holes are spaces in which
scenes develop alongside audience members ordering cocktails thereby further drawing the
audience into the narrative. By referencing inns and taverns that exist just outside the immersive
space of the outdoor public theater, Shakespeare invokes elements so bound up in contemporary
immersion such as audience interaction, physical liminal spaces, and the sensorial qualities of
touch and taste.

Alehouses, Inns and Brothels: Liminal London
Experiencing theater in early modern London, like attending theatrical experiences today,
was in and of itself a liminoid event housed within a liminal space. This aspect of naming actual
taverns and inns in London —and specifically, in prologues, epilogues and references to
contemporaneous early modern London locations-- blurs the threshold between fact and fiction
to a degree that the liminoid experience of the theater bleeds out into liminal spaces in the city.
In order to fully flesh out the hetertopic and liminoid potentials of references to imbibing in
framing texts and placing factual taverns within fictional narratives, I cite cultural anthropologist
Victor Turner’s division between liminal and liminoid phenomena, Michel Foucault’s theories of
heterotopia, and Joanna Bucknall, a practice based theater scholar focused on immersive
performance, who explores how liminal spaces in contemporary immersive performance invite
audience members to engage in ludic play.
1

1
A wide swath of contemporary scholars has made diverse and fascinating contributions to Arnold van Gennep’s
and Victor Turner’s work on the liminal and the liminoid, and most of the work teases out the liminal and limioid
spaces in tourism and leisure industries. Namely, Jennifer Laing and Warwick Frost’s recent collection of essays
about the liminal in tourism and global rituals; several articles about the liminoid in commercial air travel written
(independently of one another) by Andrea M. McDonnell and Alexandra G. Murphy; James W Lett’s articles about
the liminoid qualities of the charter yacht industry in the Caribbean; and two articles about liminoid spaces and
nightlife, Marion Roberts’ “A Big Night Out,’: Young people’s drinking, social practice and spatial experience in

33
In his 2012 essay, “Liminal to Liminoid, in Play, Flow, and Ritual: an Essay in
Comparative Symbology,” Turner distinguishes between the liminal and liminoid phenomena;
namely, he outlines that liminal spaces “are collective, concerned with calendrical, biological,
social-structural rhythms,” “centrally integrated into the total social process,” and
“eufunctional,” whereas the liminoid “are more characteristically individual products,” “assigned
to ‘leisure’ activities,” “develop[ed] along the margins,” and “are plural, fragmentary, and
experimental in nature.”
18
Turner explains that, in modern society, liminal events are somewhat
akin to attending a house of worship—it is optional, perhaps, but a repeated, ritualistic visit—
whereas liminoid events are leisure-based experiences where one willingly pays money and
deploys time to enjoy an experience, such as attending an art exhibit, the Superbowl, or Mardi
Gras:
for most people the liminoid is still felt to be freer than the liminal, a matter of
choice not obligation. The liminoid is more like a commodity-indeed, often is a
commodity, which one selects and pays for-than the liminal, which elicits loyalty
and is bound up with one's membership or desired membership in some highly
corporate group. One works at the liminal, one plays with the liminoid. There may
be much moral pressure to go to church or synagogue, whereas one queues up at
the box-office to see a play by Beckett, a performance by Mort Sahl, a Superbowl
Game, a symphony concert, or an art exhibition. And if one plays golf, goes
yachting, or climbs mountains, one often needs to buy expensive equipment or
pay for club membership…There are permanent “liminoid” settings and spaces,
too-bars, pubs, some cafés, social clubs, etc.
19

By Turner’s definition, then, attending a theatrical performance would be cordoned off as a
liminoid event in a liminal space, thus zoning theaters as sites of ritualistic, repeat visits, and the
performance itself as a “leisure activity,” an “experimental” liminoid event “developed along the
margins.”
20

the ‘liminoid’ zones of English night-time cities” which focuses more on violence and binge drinking, and
“Experiential liminoid consumption: the case of nightclubbing,” a piece dedicated to how to market to clubbers, by
Babak Taheri, Keith Gori, Kevin O’Gorman, Gillian Hogg and Thomas Farrington..

34
Like Turner’s emphasis that liminoid experiences and spaces reside outside the regular
rhythms of life, Foucault describes heterotopias (or, Latin for “other spaces”) as contained places
that are distinctly other from mainstream social milieux. Foucault points to art museums,
cemeteries, hammams, brothels, colonies, bars, prisons, gardens and theaters all as places that
function heterotopically: “heterotopia has the power of juxtaposing in a single real place
different spaces and locations that are incompatible with each other. Thus on the rectangle of its
stage, the theatre alternates as a series of places that are alien to each other.”
21
Using the
“heterotopia par excellence” example of a ship, Foucault writes, it is,
a floating part of space, a placeless place, that lives by itself, closed in on itself
and at the same time poised in the infinite ocean, and yet, from port to port, tack
by tack, from brothel to brothel, it goes as far as the colonies, looking for the most
precious things hidden in their gardens.
22

This idea of a “placeless place” can be easily ascribed to the early modern tavern. If someone
hears the word “bar” in 2022, they may imagine a quiet, dimly-lit martini bar or a sports bar
festooned with neon beer signs and big screen tvs; but the transactional, leisure-focused activity
of paying for the experience to sit, relax and have a drink is repeated in history. Foucault notes
that heterotopias carry a timelessness or link “to bits and pieces of time, i.e. they open up through
what we might define as a pure symmetry of heterochronisms. The heterotopia enters fully into
function when men find themselves in a sort of total breach of their traditional time.”
23
This
framing of heterotopias as also functioning heterochronistically echoes the way that time is
paused or distorted when having drinks in a tavern—or the way that time moves differently when
a person attends a theatrical production.
Bucknall argues in her 2016 article, “Liminoid Invitations and Liminoid Acts: The role of
ludic strategies and tropes in immersive and micro-performance dramaturgies,” that immersive

35
work is so enticing because it invites the audience member to participate in “ludic” or “shallow
play” and step in-between worlds “outside of daily praxis.”
24
Bucknall emphasizes that liminoid
acts occurring within immersive liminal spaces, such as one-to-one experiences with actors, are
“micro-performances” that offer the allure of the “the potential of this space that
is radical or charged…holds a tension that charges the space through possibility and
potential.”
25
(Emphasis is Bucknall’s.) Although the micro-performances that Bucknall
references here are found in contemporary immersive theater performance, I suggest that when
early modern actors speak directly to the audience or initiate touch in prologues and epilogues,
they are similarly initiating liminoid acts.

“Give Me Your Hand”: Invitations for Audience Interaction in Inductions, Prologues and
Epilogues

One of the clearest examples of how early modern theater plays with audience interaction
and liminal space is by using prologues and epilogues to bookend the narrative on stage. Early
modern prologues playfully tease the line between the ensuing narrative action and the reality of
watching a performance in the theatrical space, and many also play with sensory perception. The
prologue in Romeo and Juliet asks for the audience’s “patient ears attend,” (Romeo and Juliet,
Prologue 13), and in Henry V, Rumour opens the prologue with “Open your ears” (Henry V,
Prologue 1); as Bruce Smith emphasizes in his 1999 book, The Acoustic World of Early Modern
England: Attending to the O-Factor, that prologues repeatedly remind audiences to listen:

The fact that only six of Shakespeare’s plays happen to include speeches for a
prologue should not be taken to mean that only in these six plays did the
conventional trumpet-calls announcing the play give place to a single speaker,

36
sent out to clear the air and command the stage before the play began. ….
However distinctive they may be, Shakespeare’s six surviving prologues are alike
in casting the plays they precede as experiences to be heard.”
26

The prologue had a privileged role in the structure of the play insofar as it ushered the audience
from their distracting surroundings into the stage-world of fiction, as Douglas Bruster and Robert
Weimann argue in their 2004 book, Prologues to Shakespeare’s Theatre Performance and
Liminality in Early Modern Drama:
Key to preparing the spectators for the purely imaginative, verbally rendered play
worlds of the dramatic fictions within the early modern amphitheatrical arena,
however, was the prologue’s status as threshold. It was over this threshold that
the prologue invited the audience to move, to participate in and reflect upon a set
of new, and newly imagined, possible worlds.
27

Both the Induction for Taming of the Shrew and the epilogue for As You Like It moved the
English audience into the “newly imagined, possible worlds” of sundrenched Padua and out of
the whimsical, commune-like Arden Forest; additionally, both use highly sensorial, tactile
language to evoke English tavern culture.
The Induction for Taming of the Shrew not only ushers the audience from a “country
tavern” in England into the world of Padua, Italy, but it also emphasizes how drunkenness
transforms Christopher Sly from a common beggar into a Lord for the evening. When a Lord,
who is visiting the country to hunt with his entourage, sees the stupefied-drunk Sly outside the
tavern, he decides to play a “jest” on the downtrodden beggar. While the commentary on the
disproportionate social stratification in the framing text is highly problematic, the Induction also
draws parallels between the transformative qualities of alcohol and the transformative properties
of the stage. As Lemon explains, “social climbing might prove impossible for most theatergoers,
but in the tavern and on the stage one might set one’s worries aside and dream, if only for a little

37
while.”
28
Since the Induction closes with Sly dressed as a Lord and watching the central narrative
of Taming of the Shrew unfold along with the paying audience, Shakespeare redeems the cruelty
of the Lord’s jest and points out that all, from beggar to Lord, are invited to the show.
The Lord who goads Sly into believing he is part of the upper-class describes his
elaborate ruse in great sensory detail. He tells his entourage that if Sly is “wrapped in sweet
clothes, rings put upon his fingers,/ A most delicious banquet by his bed,” then Sly will surely
believe that he has simply awoken into the life of a Lord (Induction 1. 34-35). The Lord directs
his attendants to administer the lavish accouterments of his room, all of which sounds obscenely
opulent even by present standards: “wanton pictures,” “warm distellèd waters” for his head,
burned “sweet wood to make the lodging sweet,” music on the ready to “make a dulcet and a
heavenly sound,” “a silver basin/ Full of rose-water and bestrewn with flowers,” and “a costly
suit” (Induction 1. 43-45, 47, 51-52, 55). When Sly awakes in his contrived role as a Lord, he
likewise confirms his current reality by checking in with his senses:
Or do I dream? or have I dream'd till now?
I do not sleep: I see, I hear, I speak;
I smell sweet savours and I feel soft things:
Upon my life, I am a lord indeed
And not a tinker nor Christopher Sly.
Well, bring our lady hither to our sight;
And once again, a pot o' the smallest ale (Induction 2. 67-73).

Sly begins by questioning his wakefulness, but then assuredly confirms that his five senses are
working as he invokes a synesthesia of feeling and sensing his new world: “I see, I hear, I speak;/
I smell… and I feel soft things” (68-69). At surface, Sly’s belief that he is now a Lord makes him
the butt of the Lord’s joke; however, I read this cataloguing of senses as a gentle invitation, (or in
today’s shorthand, a gentle meditation) for the audience to open their senses along with Sly. And,
perhaps the Induction primes the audience’s capacity for sensorial transformation precisely

38
because the scene that immediately follows is that of a luxuriant and glamorized Italy. Lucentio
speaks the opening lines of the play, and says “the great desire I had/ to see fair Padua, nursery
of arts,/ I am arrived fore fruitful Lombardy,/ The pleasant garden of great Italy” (1.1.2-4). This
juxtaposition between the rowdy tavern the resplendent depiction of Italy is surely
transformative— additionally, by Foucault’s definition of heterotopia, we move from the
heterotopia of tavern to the heterotopia of the “pleasant garden of great Italy.” And, since the
audience is likely tippling as they watch, the shift of perception is warmed by not only the
implied Italian sun but also the effects of liquor.
While prologues are charged with introducing a play, epilogues are tinged with the “ethos
generated by the communal participation of an audience.”
29
Additionally, epilogues functioned
as requests for audience approval vis a vis applause and bore the brunt of the playwright’s
preoccupation with the fate of the play: will it live on to see another day, or will it close?
30

Several epilogues make explicit requests of the audience for applause, specifically Puck in A
Midsummer Night’s Dream, the King in All’s Well That Ends Well and Prospero in The Tempest.
In penultimate line to the audience in A Midsummer Night’s Dream is “So, good night unto you
all/ Give me your hands, if we be friends” (Epilogue 14-15). Here, Puck requests applause, but
the actor is also likely inviting playgoers to shake hands, thus physically crossing the threshold
between stage and audience.
31
Likewise, the prologues to All’s Well That Ends Well and The
Tempest ask for applause and handshakes, thereby dissolving the boundary between stage and
audience space; the King in All’s Well That Ends Well ends the play with the simple request of
the audience to “express content” and “Your gentle hands lend us, and take our hearts” (All’s
Well That Ends Well, Epilogue 3, 6), and Prospero says, “With the help of your good
hands:/Gentle breath of yours my sails/ Must fill, or else my project fails,/Which was to please”

39
(Epilogue 10-13). Smith notes that, despite not being included as part of the printed text to
accompany Shakespeare’s plays, jigs and dances likely served as an alternative to close most
plays:
The singing and dancing that close A Midsummer Night’s Dream are cast by the
fairies themselves as a piece of magic-making that will bring blessings upon the
newly married couples…Though the connection with sympathetic magic may be
less striking, the dances that are scripted to conclude Much Ado and As You Like It
serve to close the liminal circle of the play in just the way the fairies close
Dream.
32

In the same imaginative vein, I can imagine that just as the invocation for actors to requests
applause as well as handshakes by uttering “hands” in prologues, the use of music and dances
would inspire the same interactivity by encouraging audience members to dance along with the
actors on-stage.
Like Puck, Prospero and the King, when Rosalind delivers the epilogue at the close of As
You Like It, she invokes touch. In addition to employing tactile language, Rosalind likewise
heightens the conviviality by referencing alehouses and tavern culture:
if it be true that good wine needs no bush, 'tis true that a good play needs no
epilogue; yet to good wine they do use good bushes, and good plays prove the
better by the help of good epilogues. (Epilogue 3-7).

When she declares, “good wine needs/no bush,” Rosalind is referring to the practice of hanging a
branch over a tavern to indicate that wine is for sale. This practice—and line in As You Like It--
was so popular in early modern England that it begot a proverb meaning that “there's no need to
advertise or boast about something of good quality as people will always discover its merits.”
33

In addition to encouraging a jovial atmosphere by invoking tavern culture and wine, Rosalind
invokes touch by way of kissing all those audience members who will applaud the play. She
says,

40
If I were a woman, I would kiss as many of you had beards that pleased me,
complexions that liked me and breaths that I defied not. And I am sure, as many
as have good beards, or good faces, or sweet breaths will for my kind offer, when
I make curtsy, bid me farewell.” (Epilogue 14-19)

Rosalind’s epilogue not only urges the audience to “bid her farewell,” or applaud for the play,
but she also invites the audience to interact through raising cheers and offering kisses, thus
prolonging the convivial warmth of the closing celebratory marriage scene in As You Like It. The
epilogue here serves as a liminal space for the audience to be invited into the celebration of the
marriage between Rosalind and Orlando and to increase actor-audience interaction.

Early Modern Site-Specificity: When Fictional Characters Visit Factual London
Both Twelfth Night and Henry IV Part 1 reference locales contemporaneous to the
Shakespeare’s London within these fictional and historical narratives, thus blurring the line
between the fantasy on stage and the reality which surrounds the playhouse. I have always been
fascinated by the specific naming of these two inns while Shakespeare’s other plays are
relatively devoid of precise locations other than widely known geographical ones, such as the
Rialto in The Merchant of Venice or the Nile in Antony and Cleopatra. What was the draw to
punctuate the exotic world of Ilyria with The Elephant in Twelfth Night, a reference to the salty
south suburb of Elephant and Castle, or to disrupt the historical accuracy of Henry IV Parts 1 and
2 by naming the Boar’s Head Inn? And, moreover, why link these real-life places to one very
minor character, Antonio, and one character, Falstaff, who certainly lives life on the margins?
Although Twelfth Night is set in the imagined Dukedom of Illyria, Antonio, the visiting
ship captain, recommends to Sebastian that “in the south suburbs at the Elephant/ is best to
lodge” (3.3.39-40). (Sebastian is Viola’s twin brother from whom she was separated during a

41
shipwreck; Antonio is the ship captain who found Sebastian and saved him from drowning.) The
suburbs, or Liberties of London, were the boundaries of the city, and the theater district of
Southbank was likewise situated on the urban margin. But, as Steven Mulaney notes in The
Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England, the Liberties of London
were also considered to be areas where misfit behavior could take place:
the outskirts of the premodern city were places of a complex and contradictory
sort of freedom, ambivalent zones of transition between one realm of authority
and another…. They were the suburbs of the urban world, forming an underworld
officially recognized as lawless.
34

And this area south of the City of London that Antonio references would likely have well been
associated with lawlessness. Although it appears that there wasn’t specifically an inn called the
Elephant during
Shakespeare’s day,
there was a street in the
south suburbs called
Elephant Alley which
was known as “a
narrow dirty Passage
into Maiden Lane,
having only a
Brewhouse on it.”
35

(Fig 3) This detail was
first noted in John
Stow’s 1598 “Survey of London” which was completed by John Strype in 1633—and the street
referred to here at Maiden Lane was likely Maid Lane, an a street in the southern suburbs that
Figure 3: Screenshot of the early modern location of the Elephant on a
contemporary map of London. The Map of Early Modern London, Edition 7.0,
edited by Janelle Jenstad, U of Victoria, 05 May 2022.

42
was very close to the theater district. Edward Hatton’s 1708 A New View of London includes an
entry about “Elephant alley, on the N. side of Maid lane Southwork, a passage to the E. end of
the Bank side.”
36
(Coincidentally, there is still a small alley-like street in present-day Covent
Garden called Maiden Lane; like Maid Lane, in early modern England, it was also an area that
was known for its numerous brothels.
37
) Emily Allison’s research for the Map of Early Modern
England indicates that the Elephant was “part of a row of twelve licensed brothels or stewhouses
along Bankside” and that it is probable that the brewhouse Strype refers to was The Elephant
since “brothels, inns, and brewhouses were often conflated in early modern London.”
38
Antonio
pushes his money upon Sebastian, predicting that his “eye shall light upon some toy/ [he has]
desire to purchase” (3.3.45-46). Since the connections between taverns, inns, alehouses and
brothels were common in the early modern period, perhaps we can assume that the “toy” to
which Antonio refers might have been a sex worker on Sebastian’s way to the inn. After all,
pleasures stemming from either the warmth of drink or of the flesh were housed in places that,
according to Turner’s emphasis on leisure and Foucault’s underscoring of the “other,” are
decidedly liminoid and heterotopic. A quick look at a map of modern London indicating where
Elephant Alley would have been in early modern London shows that it would have been well
within reach the Globe, and certainly close enough for playgoers to wander there after a
performance. And, the Elephant and Castle pub still stands in South London near a Tube stop of
the same name, so attendees of the rebuilt Globe on Bankside can still recreate this route South
in the footsteps of Sebastian.
39

43
Whereas the reference to an inn on Elephant Alley might have been a means for the
spectator to imagine Sebastian on the outskirts of the City of London, in Henry IV Part 1 and
Henry IV Part 2, Shakespeare depicts Falstaff holding bawdy court while drinking sack at the
anachronistically placed Boar’s Head Tavern in Eastcheap, a neighborhood in the City of
London. (Fig 4) Although Falstaff’s
Boar’s Head Tavern did not exist
during the time that Shakespeare wrote
Henry IV, Part 1, a Boar’s Head Inn that
had dual uses as a performance site and
an alehouse existed in Whitechapel
which was, at that time, outside of the
city’s jurisdiction that prohibited
theatrical performance.
40
Not only is
Falstaff a denizen of the bars and
brothels in eastern London, he also grew up in the neighborhood; Falstaff proudly tells Hal, “My
noble lord, [I am] from Eastcheap” (2.5.402) And, as Rebecca Lemon so tenderly argues in her
2018 book, Addiction and Devotion in Early Modern England, Falstaff is prideful of his time
drinking at the Boar’s Head not because he is solely addicted to alcohol but because he is so
devoted to Hal. Lemon explains, “understanding Falstaff’s addiction to Hal and its proxy, sack,
as a wearing but enabling relation allows us to appreciate Falstaff’s attachment as an expression
of devotional intimacy.”
41
Falstaff is such a beloved character not only because he is the clown
getting into half-in-the-bag shenanigans, but also because of his huge capacity for love which we
see played out with Hal.
Figure 4: Screenshot of an engraving of “Boar’s Head
Tavern: Prince Hal, Falstaff and Poins” by Charles Heath, the
elder after the artist, Robert Smirke, 1825-1840. Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York, NY.

44
The Boar’s Head Tavern is situated as a heterochronic place that was less associated with
idle leisure than with total time suck. In one of the first scenes in Henry IV Part 1 in Prince
Harry’s apartment in the palace, Prince Hal goads Falstaff for his gluttonous, idle nature:
Thou art so fat-witted with drinking of old sack, and unbuttoning thee after
supper, and sleeping upon benches after noon, that thou hast forgotten to demand
that truly which thou wouldst truly know. What a devil hast thou to do with the
time of day? Unless hours were cups of sack, and minutes capons, and clocks the
tongues of bawds, and dials the signs of leaping-houses, and the blessed sun
himself a fair hot wench in flame-coloured taffeta, I see no reason why thou
shouldst be so superfluous to demand the time of day (1.2.2-10).

Although Prince Hal is badgering Falstaff for being a drunk, he is also describing a more upscale
tavern life of “sack,” or wine; “capons” or castrated roosters that were considered an Elizabethan
delicacy; “leaping-houses,” or brothels; and a “wench in flame-coloured taffeta,” which was the
fabric worn by prostitutes. Moreover, sack, capons and sex workers would have been circulated
in the theater, thereby drawing further similarities between Fasltaff’s beloved Boar’s Head
Tavern and the playhouse.
Before he takes over his kingly duties, Prince Hal and his ruffian entourage primarily
frequent the Boar’s Head Tavern owned by Mistress Quickly, Falstaff’s favorite drinking den in
Eastcheap, Prince Hal’s slumming behavior in taverns serves as counterpoint to his royal
heritage of castles, halls, and battlefields. Hal tells Ned Poins that the tapsters in Boar’s Head
Tavern regaled the Prince as, “the king of courtesy, and tell me flatly I am no proud jack like
Falstaff, but a Corinthian, a lad of mettle, a good boy—by the Lord, so they call me; and when I
am King of England I shall command all the good lads in Eastcheap” (2.5.9-13). That Hal drinks
in a tavern with a diverse group also suggests a levelling, which would have perhaps appealed to
the diverse crowd of 3,000 in the Globe. As Lemon unpacks, “sack offers, for Falstaff, the
equalizing liquid that brings together the tavern crew, overcoming potential divisions between

45
himself and his younger, fitter, more aristocratic companions. These men all become, in
drinking, “gallants, lads, boys” together.”
42
This social fluidity was also potentially inherent in
an Elizabethan tavern: “a knight might have been supposed to drink at an inn. By choosing a
tavern over an inn there is the opportunity for high to meet low in a less stratified arena than the
inn would permit.”
43
Whereas inns were places along trade routes for merchants to stop and sleep
and eat something, taverns did not simultaneously function as a hotel, so the tavern was
associated with idle leisure whereas the inn was associated with mercantilism.
Only a few scenes in the Henry IV Part 1 and Henry IV Part 2 take place in the Boar’s
Head Tavern, but its legacy holds strong cultural currency. As Albert H Tolman suggested in
1919, “it is plain that Shakespeare knew [tavern life] well, and he portrays it with great fulness of
pungent detail. Perhaps no other portion of his work equals these scenes in vividness and
reality.”
44
And Lemon likewise posits that Shakespeare finds joy and imaginative freedom in
these scenes about tavern culture: “the capers, gags, and witty exchanges of the tavern
foreground the playful imagination of the playwright, who is freed from the more constraining
historical narrative of the plays’ other plot lines.”
45
Although the site of the fictional Boar’s Head
Tavern in Eastcheap was not far from the real Boar’s Head Inn in Whitechapel, the lure of the
fictional Boar’s Head Tavern has been strong over history. In the early 1900s, Washington Irving
wrote about trying to visit the tavern, though his efforts were “in vain, for the ancient abode of
Dame Quickly, the only relic of it is a Boar’s Head, carved in relief in stone.”
46
Falstaff fans can
see what is described to be a relic of the Boar’s Head Tavern at the Globe, even now blurring the
fictional narrative with the factual here and now.

46
Last Call, or Conclusion
Attending the theater, now as then, holds a ritualistic quality. We purchase our tickets,
select theater appropriate attire, walk through the front doors, maybe have a drink or a snack,
find our seats (or, if it’s an immersive production, stand by for our invitation to wander), and
wait for the lights to dim. Drawing from the work of Victor Turner, Richard Schechner cites the
freeing quality of attending ritual and the liminal state in which one finds oneself:
“Rituals are more than structures and functions; they are also among the most
powerful experiences life has to offer. While in a liminal state, people are freed
from the demands of daily life. They feel at one with their comrades; personal and
social differences are set aside. People are uplifted, swept away, taken over.
Turner called this liberation from the constraints of ordinary life ‘anti-structure’
and the experience of ritual camaraderie ‘communitas.’”
47

This freedom can be experienced by partaking in the ritual of theater. And the liminoid and
heterotopic references in Shakespearean plays can still be sought out since theatergoers can
retrace Shakespearean characters’ steps through Eastcheap, pop across the Thames to see the
Boar’s Head Tavern sign installed at the Globe, and meander South to have a drink and a meal at
the Elephant and Castle pub. This spilling over of Shakespearean narrative into real life—and
vice versa—is like spilling ale out of a cup. These details not only conjure the conviviality of
tavern culture but also forge affinity between the audience and the characters. The Boar’s Head
and the Elephant do not evoke Hopper-esque images of a single person sitting alone at a counter;
like Shakespearean performance and tropes, these bars of yore, just as those we visit today, are
heterotopic, liminoid places where stopping time to have a drink is the only purpose.

47

Chapter Two

~

Site-specificity and Fairs, Ludic Play and Bears:
Contemporary Immersion in Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair

Every Sunday and Wednesday in London there are bearbaitings on the other side of the
water… The theatre is circular, with galleries round the top for the spectators; the ground space
down below, beneath the clear sky, is unoccupied. In the middle of this place a large bear on a
long rope was bound to a stake, then a number of great English mastiffs were brought in and
shown first to the bear, which they afterwards baited one after another: now the excellence and
fine temper of such mastiffs was evinced, for although they were much struck and mauled by the
bear, they did not give in, but had to be pulled off by sheer force, and their muzzles forced open
with long sticks to which a broad iron piece was attached at the top. The bears’ teeth were not
sharp so they could not injure the dogs; they have them broken short. When the first mastiffs
tired, fresh ones were brought in to bait the bear.
1

--Thomas Platter
When Thomas Platter, a young medical student from Basel, visited England in 1599, he
kept a journal of his impressions of his travels around the country, and the most richly detailed
portion describes how Londoners spent their leisure time in the city that is “brimful of
curiosities.”
2
Platter’s travelogue reads like a Ren-Fair aficionado’s fantasy: he took in several
theater shows, especially lauding a production of Julius Caesar on the South Bank; he marveled

48

over the number of “wives at the alehouses” who take “wine with sugar” in groups without men
to accompany them; he noted the “great swarms” of prostitutes frequenting taverns and
playhouses.
3
In addition to the sights he took in in and around London, Platter wrote extensively
about the gruesome early modern blood sports, namely cock fighting, bull- and bear-baiting.
Notably, Platter wrote that the cock-fights took place in a house “built like a theatre,” and, in the
above passage about bear baiting, his reference to travelling to “the other side of the water”
indicates that he likely went to the theater district on the south side of the Thames.
4
The
playhouses and bear-baiting arenas were situated next to one another on Bankside and shared
many architectural features, and Hope Theater hosted theater productions on Saturdays and
blood sports on Sundays (Fig. 5). Jason Scott-Warren writes that bear baiting and performance
Figure 5: Screenshot of the AGAS Map of Early Modern London, marking the site of the Bear Garden on
Bankside. This map was edited by Janelle Jenstad at the U of Victoria, 05 May 2022.

49
were in fact considered to be comparable experiences in his 2003 article, “When Theaters Were
Bear-Gardens; Or, What's at Stake in the Comedy of Humors”:
In the early modern period the sports of baiting and playing occupied homologous
social positions, caught between the paying London crowd and the nobles and
monarchs who continued to patronize them-and who intermittently brought them
to court for command performances.
5

Not only were these spaces in which both animals and humans compete and perform for others’
pleasure, but this conflation of theater and blood sports also illuminates the ways in which bodies
in theater are consumed for entertainment. Although Platter’s account of the mastiffs setting on
the bears is horribly cruel from a 2022 vantage point, this notion of a dual use theater in the early
17
th
century anticipates the contemporary immersive quality of site-specificity.
6

While my other chapters all focus on Shakespearean plays, this chapter examines
immersive qualities in the narrative and production history of Ben Jonson’s play Bartholomew
Fair. Many playwrights of the period make references to bear baiting; this was in part perhaps to
please King James as the monarch was purportedly a fan of animal blood sports.
7
And although
this chapter examines Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair, the cross-pollination between bear-baiting
and theater likewise features in Shakespearean plays. Perhaps the most famous Shakespearean
reference to the blood sport is at the end of Macbeth when Macbeth says, “They have tied me to
a stake; I cannot fly,/ But, bear-like, I must fight the course" (5.7.1-2). Of course, Macbeth’s fate
is much like the set-upon bears that Platter describes as the bloody king is “staked” in that he is
cornered and slaughtered by the end of the play. One of the most peculiar and infamous
references to the bear-baiting takes place in the stage directions of The Winter’s Tale: “exit,
pursued by a bear” (3.3.57). The direction reads as an absurd piece of comedy today; however,
while it is unclear whether the “bear” was an actor wearing a bear costume or a real, flesh-and-

50
blood bear, it would have been a well-understood gag to early modern audiences who might have
been able to hear and smell the bears during the production. Moreover, Shakespeare references
Bartholomew Fair (the event, not the play) in Henry IV Part 2. While Falstaff and Doll
Tearsheet get increasingly drunk in Hostess Quickly’s Boar’s Head Tavern in Eastcheap, Doll
Tearsheet affectionately calls Falstaff a “whoreson little tidy Bartholomew boar-pig” (Henry IV
Part 2, 2.4.205) and Falstaff, to return the term of endearment, calls Doll Tearsheet a “Barbary
hen” (2.4.85) or slang for a prostitute. Henry IV Part 2 premiered in 1600, so clearly
Shakespeare was citing the annual event of Bartholomew Fair rather than Bartholomew Fair,
Jonson’s play; however, echoes within the early modern worlds of theater, fairs and bears
abound.
The 1614 premier of Bartholomew Fair at the Hope Theater on the South Bank
complicates questions of early modern site-specificity, polysensorial cues and ludic play both
within the architectural structure of the theater and the dialogue of the play that self-consciously
cites the structure. Jonson’s satire accompanies city-dwelling Puritans and playwrights onto the
grounds of Bartholomew Fair, a four-day festival that occurred every August on the outskirts of
London, where ensues “an excess of drink, a distinct lack of morals and a whole heap of sin
amongst the fair’s resident butchers, pimps and pickpockets.”
8
Jonson’s play incorporates
contemporaneous sites and events that would have been familiar to his early modern audience
such as Smithfield market, the site of Bartholomew Fair from 1133 to 1855.
9
Formerly an
execution site in the 13
th
and 14
th
centuries (including where William Wallace was “hanged,
drawn and quartered”
10
) Smithfield is situated in northwest London and remains one of city’s
largest meat markets,
11
and during Jonson’s day it was also a livestock market and
slaughterhouse as well as an execution site.
12
By looking at the history of blood sports in the

51
Hope Theater and the site of Smithfield alongside the overt animal imagery in Bartholomew
Fair, components of contemporary immersion-- namely polysensorial stenches, site-specificity
and ludic play-- help to reframe Jonson’s play as an early modern performance that predicts
contemporary immersive theater practices.

“Forces of Rupture”: Site-Specificity and Ludic Play at the Hope Theater
13

Jonson’s play is an especially suggestive text to frame within contemporary terms of site-
specificity because Bartholomew Fair premiered twice in 1614: first at the public and outdoor
Hope theater and the very next day at a private Court performance for King James.
14
Not only
do the sites of each performance vary radically, but also each premiere had a different prologue.
The Hope theater production included a lengthy metatheatrical Induction, while the King heard a
tidy prologue of twelve lines; Francis Teague notes that the Induction meant only for the Hope
theatergoers was omitted for the court audience as they would have found the references to the
“theater’s filthy condition or the admission price…..obscure, even rude.”
15

A key characteristic in current immersive theater productions is the element of site-
specificity, or a non-traditional theater space that is often used for other events, and one of the
more evocative developments of site-specificity occurs when a play is performed in a place that
isn’t necessarily zoned for theater productions. As Marvin A. Carlson posits in the 2001 Haunted
Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine, each performance is ghosted by a previous one;
notably, he writes that the events that happened on site cannot be erased:
the ghosts of a public’s previous experience with a specific location—a town
square, a threshing floor, a cemetery—are not completely exorcized when the
improvised theatrical space imposed upon such locations is replaced by a
permanent building, within which there are none of the visible traces of the area
where theatre is located.
16

52

Similarly, in her 1999 book, Space in Performance: Making Meaning in the Theatre, Gay
McAuley points to the ways in which the Sydney Wharf Theatre, a formerly operable labor space
in the Sydney harbor that was renovated to become a theater, contains echoes of the wharf and
the labor that took place and exemplifies ways in which “connotations of the buildings earlier
use may spill over to color in subtle ways the theatre activity.”
17
And, in terms of how
Bartholomew Fair might have influenced spectators conceptions of Smithfield, McAuley notes
that “real places have to transform the fictions that might be enacted there… [and] the influence
is not, of course, all one way, and performance can also transform spectators' experience of
place, even places with which they are very familiar.”
18
Since attending Bartholomew Fair was
such an integral part of London culture, the audience watching a play about the event would have
surely brought, to cite Rancière, an “unpredictable interplay of associations and dissociations.
19

And just as Jonson’s public audience visited the South Bank to attend Bartholomew Fair
when it premiered at the Hope Theater in Bankside, the characters in Bartholomew Fair exit the
center of London to attend Bartholomew Fair in Smithfield. In 1859, Henry Morley evokes the
spirit of pilgrimage to the green space housing the ephemeral fair when he writes about,
the arbours of green boughs, which disappeared from the Fair, as in the course of
time London expanded, remind us that in the beginning of the seventeenth
century, they who crossed Smithfield with their faces to the country very soon
were in the open fields.
20

The site of Smithfield serves as a liminal space for the characters in Bartholomew Fair to cavort
and take a break from the quotidian grind, and it also served as a liminal meeting ground for both
city- and country-dwellers of early modern London. Tom Harrison, in his 2017 article, “Taking
Liberties: The Influence of the Architectural and Ideological Space of the Hope Theatre on
Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair,” unpacks the anachronistic elements of site-specificity in Jonson’s

53
Bartholomew Fair. Harrison draws parallels between the characters in Bartholomew Fair and the
liminal passage of playgoers across the Thames, and names the fair at Smithfield an “urban
Arden, a not-so-green world where his city-dwelling characters, and the values of that city they
have left behind, could be tested.”
21
(Fig 6) Harrison notes that Jonson’s locations of the real and
imagined sites in the Smithfield-
esque Hope theater, both on the
outskirts of London, offered space
for “mental and ideological freedom
for such a reflection to take place,
and the parallels between real and
fictive Londoners entering Jonson’s
imagined Fair together serves as a
metaphor for the sort of experiential
journey this audience was undertaking.”
22
Like the characters in Bartholomew Fair, Harrison
asserts that audience members undergo a parallel experience when travelling to see a play in the
Liberties which allows for the audience to reflect on their own social-cultural involvement in a
Foucauldian heterotopia.
1
Just as Jonson’s “imagined Fair” provides a space for audience
members to reflect, the factual Bartholomew Fair on Smithfield likewise provided a space for
fair-goers to enjoy “mental and ideological” freedom for several days in August each year.
Both Bankside and Smithfield were places associated with revelry and relaxation, and
both are on the outskirts of London; these locations and their intended uses signal an off-duty

1
Michel Foucault specifically cites fairs as heterotopic events, “those marvelous empty zones outside the city limits,
that fill up twice a year with booths, showcases, miscellaneous objects, wrestlers, snake-women, optimistic fortune-
tellers, etc.”
Figure 6: Screenshot of “Bartholomew Fair” by Thomas
Rowlandson, 1807. The Met.

54
playfulness, or space for ludic activity. Most large-scale, public early modern theaters were
situated next to other such houses of indulgence like alehouses, inns for dining, gambling halls
and brothels, which marked theater districts, much like today, as sites for play of all sorts.
23
As
Jonson pithily wrote, “I have considered our whole life is like a play,”
24
and, until the 17
th

century, the words “games” and “plays” were interchangeable when referencing theatrical
productions.
25
There is also something inherently human and animalistic about play, as Johan
Huizinga explores in his 1938 book, Homo Ludens—or, Latin for “the playing human.” Given
the proximity of theaters to alehouses and bear gardens, the potentials for ludic play within and
without the playhouses were abundant, and, as Huizinga asserts on the first page of Homo
Ludens, “animals play just like men.”
26
Huizinga likewise emphasizes that leaving behind real
life to enter a “temporary sphere” allows for the freedom necessary for pure play:
the first main characteristic of play: that it is free, is in fact freedom. A second
characteristic is closely connected with this, namely, that play is not ‘ordinary’ or
‘real’ life. It is rather a stepping out of ‘real’ life into a temporary sphere of
activity with a disposition all of its own.
27

The “temporary sphere” not only allows freedom for play but also mimics the quality of stepping
into the liminoid and ludic space of a theater or a fairground to be immersed in something
different and new.
And, in addition to the liminal, ludic, and heterotopic nature of Hope Theater and
Smithfield market of course, plays, fairs, gambling, and Bartholomew Fair are all zoned as
carnivalesque, or a “world upside down.”
28
In Bartholomew Fair, the fairgrounds of Smithfield
are a carnivalesque melting pot, and we watch as pickpockets and prostitutes exert the rules over
gallants and titled women. In his 1965 seminal book on the carnivalesque, Rabelais and His

55
World, Mikhail Bakhtin notes that carnival was not only a time to feast and be merry, but also a
point of paused time during which revelers could forget their quotidian identities:
carnival celebrated temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the
established order; it marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges,
norms, and prohibitions. Carnival was the true feast of time, the feast of
becoming, change, and renewal.
29

Like Huizinga’s “temporary sphere” of freedom, the element of carnivalesque demarcates both a
space of lawlessness as well as demarcates a time for lawlessness. As Peter Stallybrass and Allon
White note about the fair in Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair, not only do they serve as zones for
revelry and the upper classes to get their comeuppance, but they are also necessary zones for
people to blow off steam. Citing Sir Henry Wotton’s 1692 observation regarding the necessity
for the pre-Lenten release of Venetian Carnivale, Stallybrass and White note, “plays, fairs and
festivals were interchangeable as safety valves.”
30

In his article, Harrison points to Steven Mullaney’s widely cited 1995 book, The Place of
the Stage: License, Play and Power in Renaissance England, in which he indicates that, in the
early modern period, much of the transgressive culture of theater happened on the Liberties, or
edges of London. Mullaney notes that it was in these spaces where misfit behavior could
profligate and become a transformative, freeing space:
the outskirts of the premodern city were places of a complex and contradictory
sort of freedom, ambivalent zones of transition between one realm of authority
and another…. They were the suburbs of the urban world, forming an underworld
officially recognized as lawless.
31

Bartholomew Fair, set in Smithfield and housed in the Hope, represents the “lawlessness” of
both the green edges of London (within the play’s narrative) and the theater. And, in addition to
the “complex and contradictory sort of freedom” in these areas of the city, there is what Roland

56
Barthes, in his 1966 lecture entitled “Semiology and the Urban,” calls an “erotic dimension.”
Barthes speaks of the patterns inherent in the “semiotics of a city” and notes that there is an
“erotic dimension” of ludic play that is generated by city centers:
city centre is always felt as the space where subversive forces, forces of rupture,
ludic forces act and meet. Play is a subject very often emphasized in the surveys
on the centre; there is in France a series of surveys concerning the appeal of Paris
for the suburbs, and it has been observed through these surveys that Paris as a
centre was always experienced semantically by the periphery as the privileged
place where the other is and where we ourselves are other, as the place where we
play the other. In contrast, all that is not the centre is precisely that which is not
ludic space, everything which is not otherness: family, residence, identity.”
32

While neither Bankside nor Smithfield were at the center of early modern London but rather on
the outskirts of town, each was created with the intention to be a center of ludic activity “where
subversive forces, forces of rupture, ludic forces act and meet.”
33
Most tellingly in the passage
above from Barthes is when he writes of “the appeal of Paris for the suburbs” and if we are to
understand that the suburbs provide relative safety along with homogenous or relatively dull
cultural activity. In this regard, the edges of town where the theaters and fairgrounds were
located are thus charged with the energy and potential for attendees to “play the other.” The
South Bank was seedy, and while Puritanical Londoners might have deemed it as littered with
depravity and filth, many others likely saw it as a playground for drink, sex, games, play and
general revelry—and certainly this air of the debauched would have seeped into the theater
experience.

Haunted by the Stench of Bears
The site of the Hope Theater has always been haunted by bears. In 1583, the observation

57
area in the Bear Garden on the South Bank collapsed and killed eight people, and prospectors
soon thereafter made plans to build a dual-use structure for theater and bear-baiting on the land.
34

The Hope theater was contracted
in 1613 by Philip Henslowe and
Jacob Meade, and Jonson’s
Bartholomew Fair, first staged on
October 14, 1614, was the first
recorded performance at the
Hope.
35
However, in keeping with
the ephemerality of theater and
fairs, the structure of the Hope Theater itself did not enjoy a particularly long tenure. By 1620,
most companies and players refused to perform at the Hope due to its squalid conditions, and the
structure was used solely for bearbaiting and prize fighting and reverted to being called the Beare
Garden.
36
(Fig 7) Parliament ordered the owners to destroy the animals and tear down the
building in 1655 after a man and a child were mauled to death by some of the bears.
37
Perhaps in
condemning the building, the city of London and owners attempted to avoid the possibility of a
haunted space that ran with the ghosts of bears, dogs, a man, and a child; but, of course, each
performance that took place during its heyday was indelibly haunted by the history that took
place on the site of the Hope theater.
The production of Bartholomew Fair at the Hope theater was both ghosted by bear and
mastiff performers as well as populated by animalistic descriptions of human characters. The
Induction includes visceral descriptions of the stink of both Smithfield fair and the Hope theater.
From the very start of the play as it was performed in Hope Theater, the fair is framed as part of
Figure 7: Screenshot of bearbaiting in the 16
th
century. 1795. Hulton
Archive, Getty Images.

58
and populated by the animal kingdom; during the Induction, the Stage-Keeper shares that the
forthcoming play is not very good because Jonson “has not conversed with the Bartholomew-
birds,” or female prostitutes, nor seen “the juggler with a well-educated ape” (Induction 15).
Trained apes and monkeys were popular acts during this time; Mercutio refers to the love-addled
Romeo as an ape playing dead when he jests, “He heareth not, he stirreth not, he moveth not/
The ape is dead, and I must conjure him” (2.1.16-17). The Book-Holder jabs at the Stage Keeper
about his opinion of the forthcoming play, saying, “Your judgment, rascal? For what? Sweeping
the stage? Or gathering up the broken apples for the bears within?” (Induction). This reference
serves two purposes: the first self-referentially insinuates that Jonson’s play will surely be the
target of fruit projectiles by the judging audience, and the second is to draw attention to the use
of the site as a place for bearbaiting. The Scrivener’s monologue ends with a reference to the
similarities of the conditions of Smithfield and Hope theater. He states that “The play shall
presently begin. And though the Fair be not kept in the same region that some here, perhaps,
would have it, yet think that therein the author hath observ’d a special decorum, the place being
as dirty as Smithfield, and as stinking every whit” (Induction 151-154). Conjuring the “stink” of
Smithfield market—a likely extraordinarily pungent venue much like the Hope— prevents the
usual escapist fantasy into another world and immerses the audience members within the theater
space.
Jonson’s play was embedded with what Mark Blankenship coined “aroma-trugy,” or the
creative decision to curate scent as part of a narrative. Blankenship argues that “when we smell
something, actual particles of an object enter our bodies… and if the smell provokes different
associations for different people, then that just personalizes the experience of the art even
more.”
38
In a similar vein, Stephen di Benedetto defines “tactile, olfactory and gustatorial” cues

59
in theatrical productions the “scenography of the senses,” which he defines as “the conception of
a design and the elements and principles used to create the material environment for
performance, and also an audience’s response to that material performance environment.”
39
Like
Blankenship’s idea that scent personalizes performance for the individual, di Benedetto argues
that these polysensorial components in live theater have the capacity to trigger an audience
member’s memory, and, ideally “the onlooker trades this rational illusionary control for sensory
rich embodiment.”
40
While contemporary “aroma-turgy” or “scenography of the senses” is
largely designed with a pleasurable scent in mind, such as the piped in perfume in upmarket
hotels or the scent of lavender wafting through the apothecary room in Punchdrunk’s Sleep No
More, the inherited stenches in Smithfield and Hope Theater were notoriously repugnant.
And, to frame how intense the famously pungent aromas of the meat market and dual use
theater perhaps were, it’s important to remember that late 16
th
century and early 17
th
century
London was already notoriously smelly. As Alexandra Logue notes in her article, “‘Saucy
Stink’: Smells, Sanitation, and Conflict in Early Modern London,” the,
crowded urban neighbourhoods meant that inhabitants’ sanitary and hygienic
practices were part of city dwellers’ daily lives. Lines of laundry were hung up
between lodgings; households disposed of kitchen waste in shared gutters, which
overflowed with refuse like rotten food and animal carcasses; and neighbours
used communal privies, or emptied chamber pots out of windows and doors,
spilling excrement into the street.
41

If this was baseline life in London, one can only imagine the conditions of 16
th
century meat
market as rife with the stench of cattle and the byproducts of blood and butchery, like that in
Smithfield. Henry Morley, in his 1859 Memoirs of Bartholomew Fair, describes the location of
Bartholomew Fair on Smithfield Market as “so foul” with “rain, and the cattle brought thither for
sale… that there were many who would even doubt the power of art to transform it into hard and

60
level ground.”
42
Historian Dianne Payne similarly writes about the living conditions of the
livestock and the aftermath of butchering them in Smithfield:
[The cattle were] slaughtered on site, their blood and dung ran freely in the
streets, while drovers squelched through the stinking mire, often unable to control
animals that escaped and rampaged among the congested shops, workshops and
taverns.
43

Payne deftly evokes not only the scent of “blood and dung,” but also the chaos of the meat
market as cattle run through the network of “shops, workshops and taverns.” Bruce R. Smith, in
The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor, offers that the sound
was likewise chaotic as “the horses, oxen, sheep, and swine could be heard in Smithfield, just
outside the walls.”
44

The chaotic conditions of Smithfield were likely not dissimilar to the chaos described at
Hope Theater. In equally visceral terms, Platter explains the root cause of the stench at Hope
theater:
On leaving we descended the steps and went behind the theatre, saw the English
mastiffs, of which there were one hundred and twenty together in one enclosure,
each chained up to his own separate kennel however. And the place was evil-
smelling because of the lights and meat on which the butchers feed the said
dogs.
45

While I’m sure that the stench of oil lamps and rancid meat surely contributed to the “evil
smelling” kennels, I can only imagine what the rank odor of 120 dogs chained up in 1599 might
have been like. Smith notes that not only the stench but the sound of the kennels would have
been apparent. Citing Thomas Platter’s account of the bear-baitings, Smith notes that both the
blood sports and the public performances on Bankside were places “that define the London
soundscape not only geographically but temporally: they were places where people came
together only at certain times of day. During those times they became dominant soundmarks.

61
Outside those times they fell into relative quiet—except, perhaps, for the animal-baiting arenas.
The adjacent kennels constituted one of the sites to be seen, and sounds to be heard.”
46
Overlaid
on the stench of bears and dog kennels, Holly Dugan describes the potential mélange of scents
that would have marked the Hope theater, a kind of
uniquely foul stench, connected to that of the surrounding area: the aroma of the
pike stews, soap-boiling yards, rose gardens, mud and the flooded, polluted
ditches of the surrounding area, were combined with the smells of the theatre – its
structure (its oak frame, thatch and hazelnut-strewn yard) and its occupants (the
sweat, urine, belches, perfume of the actors, animals and crowd, along with the
apples, oysters, ale and tobacco that they undoubtedly consumed inside.
47

The notorious smells of both Smithfield and Hope theater heightens the echoed quality of
the polysensorial of Bartholomew Fair as set in Smithfield and staged at Hope theater. And this
stench of Hope theater would have permeated the performance space, as well. As Dugan details
in somewhat vomitous terms,
the open pit where the audience stood was the arena where the most violent
baiting occurred: playgoers stood in the mud that had absorbed the blood, urine
and sweat of baited animals. The Hope, with its animal smells and sounds,
undoubtedly contributed to the festive ‘ambiance’ of the Jonson’s staged fair, the
desirable smell of pork mingling with the fearful odour of the bear.
48

Although deeply malodorous, the scent-memory of roasted pork in Smithfield and Bartholomew
fair combined with the wafts of bear, dog and rotten meat in Hope theater would have surely
featured heavily during the performance of Bartholomew Fair.
In addition to the smells embedded in the theater proper, early modern audiences would
have been well-acquainted with the aqueous smell of the Thames. Julie Sanders points out that
“Londoners and visitors to the capital would have regularly come into sight, smell, and sound of
the Thames,” and, moreover, that “the soundscape and riverscape of London, as well as of other
regions, became a veritable feature of the richly suggested, yet never quite present, world just

62
off-stage in the commercial theatres – literally so, presumably, in the case of the open
amphitheatres on the Bankside, such as the Globe, where the sound of the Thames could be
heard as an undertow to theatrical performances.”
49
Jonson invokes the river during the puppet
show featured at the end of Bartholomew Fair. Littlewit adapts the Greek myth Hero and
Leander for the fair, and in it, he exchanges Turkish strait for the early modern London theater
district;
I have only made it a little easy and modern for the times, sir, that’s all: for the
Hellespont, I imagine our Thames here; and then Leander, I make a dyer’s son,
about Puddle Wharf; and Hero a wench o’ the Bankside, who going over one
morning to old Fish Street, Leander spies her land at Trig Stairs, and falls in love
with her. (5.3.104-111)

Of course, by implanting factual London sites in this puppet-show-within-a-play, Jonson is
blurring the boundaries between fact and fiction; and by casting Hero and Leander as the hard
knock prostitute and laborer, he is again drawing attention to the carnivalesque potentials of the
fair. But, alluringly, he is also paying tribute to the geography of London, and perhaps, even,
pointing to the sound of the Thames that offered additional sonic and olfactory landscape to the
play.

“Ursa Major”: The Porcine, Polysensorial Pitmaster
In her richly detailed article about the history of Bartholomew Fair, Dianne Payne writes
of the lavish polysenorial sights, sounds and scents that likely would have wafted through
Smithfield during Bartholomew Fair:
the smell of roast pork with crackling and currant sauce, traditional fare at
Bartholomew tide, mingled with tobacco smoke. Fruit-sellers with baskets of
peaches, pears, walnuts and damsons…Fair-goers stooped over marble-boards,
dice and hazard tables drinking ale… [and] A gigantic live hog, the emblem of the

63
fair, was also on show, a specimen claimed each year to be bigger than that of the
previous one.
50

In every account of Bartholomew Fair is roasted pork and pig, and likewise, in Jonson’s
Bartholomew Fair, over and over throughout the play is the description of roasted pork. And, to
further emphasize how theater has a potentially transformative effect on a spectator’s
“experience of place,” Anne Wolckhe, in her accounts of London fairs, The perpetual fair:
gender, disorder, and urban amusement in eighteenth-century London, notes that the 18
th
century
popularity of going to the fair for the precise purpose of eating and tasting many vendors’ dishes
was likely a direct result of the depiction of characters in Bartholomew Fair seeking out Ursula’s
infamous roasted pig. Wohlcke writes, “due in part to this exaggerated seventeenth-century
depiction, late seventeenth-century and early eighteenth-century commentators on fairs perceived
dining there (and especially enjoying pork at Bartholomew Fair) essential to the fair-going
experience.”
51
As Stallybrass and White write about Jonson’s play in their seminal 1986 book,
The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, “the pig is the centre of Jonson’s text, as it was also
the centre of the Smithfield fair.”
52
Truly, the air of Bartholomew Fair is redolent with the scent
of pig.
And, the character residing at the center of the play is Ursula, “the pig woman,” a bawdy
pitmaster of roasted pork and madam of the “Bartholomew-birds” who provides a touchstone for
the tactile, gustatorial and aromatic qualities of the play (2.2.69, Induction 12). Stallybrass and
White explain that the possible frenzy surrounding roasted pork in Barthlomew Fair is in part
because “fairs in which pigs were the sole or principal commodity were extremely rare in
England.”
53
Furthermore, given the focus on roasted pig and the female body within all of the
prostitution puns in Bartholomew Fair, the etymology of the word carnival, or carne lasciare,
means “the putting away or removal of flesh (as food),” and represents the consumption of both

64
animal and human flesh at the fair.
54
But equally, the frenzy surrounding the pig is also due tothe
sexual innuendos about pig. The pig stands in for female genitalia “from early records of Greek
and Latin slang, where porcus or porcellus were used to describe the female genitalia”
55
and
“the proverbial filth of the pig is here but a synechdoche for sexual desire, the longings of the
flesh.”
56
Hiring sex workers for pleasure was an equal if not greater attraction to Bartholomew
Fair as roasted pig, and “the fair was one of the year’s great opportunities for pickpockets,
naturally, and also for prostitutes, who might be found in tents coyly labelled ‘soiled doves’ or in
a nearby street appropriately named Cock Lane.”
57

Although only Punk Alice is identified as a sex worker in the play, most all of the women
are framed as potential prostitutes, or “Bartholomew Birds” in Bartholomew Fair. When Ursula
defends her fleshy “plump” body from the jeering gallants, she curses the gallants to a bout of
syphilis that they may catch from “lean playhouse poultry, that has the bony rump sticking out
like the ace of spades or the point of a partisan, that every rib of ‘em is like the tooth of a saw
and will so grate ‘em with their hips and shoulders” (2.5.93-97). Later, when Ursula and
Knockem try to tempt Win to become a prostitute, or a “a bird o’ the game,” Ursula again
invokes the “Bartholomew-birds,” the “fowl I’ the Fair,” the “plover” and the “quail” (4.5. 12-
17), all of which all small, vulnerable birds who are preyed upon. While other female characters
do exist in the play, they are mostly exempt from this alignment with an edible or animalistic
quality; certainly, Dame Purecraft and Grace Wellborn are being traded for marriage, and
therefore not exempt from this notion that women are categorically consumable. However,
unlike Win, Ursula, and the sex workers at the fair, they are not as extensively compared to
animals. The female characters in Bartholomew Fair are depicted as animals or food to be
purchased, consumed, and seen—or rather, things for the male characters and audience members

65
to feast their eyes on. While the male tapster Mooncalf is teased for his “grasshopper’s thighs”
(2.2.64-65) and the male Fairgoers are described as the “the sincere stud, come a pig-hunting,”
(3.2.87-89), when compared to the extended blazons and reels of metaphors about the women,
the metaphor of the men as bestial are insignificant. The female characters in Bartholomew Fair
are depicted as animals or food to be purchased, consumed, and seen—or rather, things for the
male characters and audience members to feast their eyes on.
Even though the female character Win Littlewit is upper class, and she ultimately leaves
the debauchery of Fair as easily as she entered it, she is the scapegoat her husband, John
Littlewit, and his friends use to justify their presence at Bartholomew Fair. To sidestep Win’s
mother, Dame Purecraft, who deems the Fair unsavory, Littlewit beseeches Win to feign a
pregnancy induced craving for roasted pork to make it more socially acceptable for them to go to
the fair:
Win, long to eat of a pig, sweet Win, i’ the Fair; do you see? I’ the heart of the
Fair, not at Pie Corner. Your mother will do anything, Win, to satisfy your
longing, you know; pray thee long, pressntly, and be sick o’ the sudden, good
Win. I’ll go in and tell her. Cut thy lace i’ the meantime and paly the hypocrite,
sweet Win. (1.5.135-140)

After consulting with her Puritan suitor, Busy Zeal-of-the-Land, Dame Purecraft ultimately
consents as she believes the roasted pork will be nourishing, and she “would not have her
miscarry, or hazard her first fruits” (1.6.58-59). Win, as the pregnant women, heavy with “first
fruits,” is the vessel who permits the hypocritical Puritans passage into the Fair. And it is not
only her mother who casts Win as a ripening fruit; her husband’s friend Winwife
hyper-sensualizes Win as a juicy edible in an extended, fruit-heavy blazon: “you ha’ the garden
where they grow! A wife here with strawberry breath, cherry lips, apricot cheeks, and a soft

66
velvet head, like a melocoton” (1.2.13-15). In describing Win as such, Winwife is comparing her
to the fruits that could be purchased at the Fair.
And once the upper class enter the Fair and seek out Ursula’s roasted pork, Win toes the
line between upper class woman and potential prostitute. Moreover, the delicate, juicy blazons of
fruit to describe Win’s appeal turns to overt comparisons to a horse. As Peter Lake writes in his
2002 book, The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists and Players in Post-Reformation
England, after Win’s craving for pork is used as the excuse need to spur the group on to the fair,
the inciting action that leads Win and Littlewit to Ursula is Win’s pregnant body’s need to
urinate: “The basic animal quality of these impulses is often associated in the play with the
female: once thinks here of the frequent and direct equation of punk with pig, or of the way in
which the need to answer the call of ‘nature’ leads Mistress Overdo and Littlewit into Ursula’s
booth where they are all too easily seduced into drunkenness and at least the appearance of
prostitution.”
58
As Stallybrass and White note, Ursula “is also the agent of the transformation of
others,”
59
and we see this potential transformation when Littlewit leaves Win at Ursula’s pig
stand. Knockem, “a horse-corser and ranger of Turnbull,” (Turnbull is a street adjacent to
Smithfield that was populated with brothels) ascribes a different blazon to Win, that of a horse
corser appraising his new purchase:
my delicate dark chestnut here—with the fine lean head, large forehead, round
eyes, even mouth, sharp ears, long neck, thin crest, close withers, plain back, deep
sides, short fillets, and full flanks; with a round belly, a plump buttock, large
thighs, knit knees, straight legs, short pasterns, smooth hoofs, and short heels
(4.5.19-25).

Far more fleshed out and full-bodied than Winwife’s blazon of Win’s facial features and sweet
breath, Jordan Knockem moves from her head to her hoofs, focusing intensely on her
midsection, her “sides, “fillets,” “flanks,” “belly,” “buttock,” and “thighs.” While, again, Win is

67
pregnant and thus Knockem’s appraisal conjures images of animal husbandry and breeding, the
context of the conversation is to appraise Win’s earnings should she enter the sex trade.
While Bartholomew Fair famously lacks a central protagonist or moralizing character, it
is Ursula who resides at the heart of the narrative. Knockem affectionately calls Ursula, “Ursa
Major”; Latin for “greater bear,” Knockem’s description is an apt one since all the other
characters constellate around her (Bartholomew Fair, 2.5.173) She is the earthy, musky
matriarch who hawks pleasures of the flesh—both roasted pork and female prostitutes, or
“punks.” After meeting Ursula in her barbeque booth, Justice Overdo exclaims that “this is the
very womb and bed of enormity, gross, as herself!” (2.2.101-102). Stallybrass and White
describe Ursula as “belly, womb, gaping mouth, udder, the source and object of praise,”
“excessive,” and “the celebrant of the open orifice: her pores are open as is her mouth when she
roars out for a ‘bottle of ale to quench me’ or for her pipe to suck or when she spits forth a
mouth-filling oath.”
60
Knockem likewise underscores Ursula as simultaneously the porcine and
ursine mother of the fair, describing her as a “she bear” with her “litter of pigs” (2.3.1-2), as the
“mother o’ the pigs,” (2.5.68); moreover, Knockem describes Ursula’s booth as place where
many hungers are filled: “you may ha’ your punk and your pig in state, sir, both piping hot”
(2.5.36-38). And Jonson would’ve granted his audience some verisimilitude of the scents of
Ursula’s stand. Dugan notes that
Ursula and her canvas booth, located on the makeshift stage, would have towered
over the pit where an actual bear had been baited earlier in the month. So the
smells of the Hope would have mingled with the stage effects of the fair, creating
an olfactory mélange unique to Jonson’s play.
61

Knockem’s conflation of Ursula as “she bear” and the “mother o’ the pigs” would have also
resonated for the audience in an olfactory sense. At the center of Barthlomew Fair all is Ursula,

68
the maternal uber-woman who horrifies and delights, feeds and succors the others with women
and roasted pork.

~

Although Bartholomew Fair was only performed twice during Jonson’s lifetime, the play
enjoyed a resurgence of popularity in the 17
th
and 18
th
centuries;
62
even after the performance
departed from the Bankside and Hope theater, the locations and events that took place there
continue to haunt the performance. Smithfield Market is still a thriving meat market, and the
current location where the Hope Theater stood is near the rebuilt Globe theater and London’s
Tate Modern. Funnily enough, while I was in the process of revising this chapter, the County
Fair came to town for a week. My children are too little to ride the temporary carnival rides
festooned with mirrors and brightly colored light bulbs, but we went to pet angora bunnies and
llamas, get sparkly unicorns painted on their cheeks and eat funnel cakes under the hot July sun.
As I was kid wrangling, I had to chuckle: the Fair was located on a multi-use space that houses
the rodeo, the dog park, and a ring for equestrians to exercise their horses. The conflation of
animal and human enjoyment persists in my neighborhood today, and I couldn’t help but feel a
jolt of connection to the denizens of Bartholomew Fair.

69

Chapter Three

~

Howling with the Wolves
1
:
In-Person Immersive Adaptations of Shakespeare

The Drama Hotel in the Jing‘an district of Shanghai boasts that it is the first theater- and
Shakespeare-themed hotel in the city.
2
Upon arrival, guests are not given a room number but
rather a series of clues that lead them to one
of 26 rooms, each named after a
Shakespearean play. Although English
translations of press about The Drama Hotel
are scarce, nods to Shakespeare can be culled
from pictures of the property: the first or
bottom floor is instead referred to (in
English) as the “First Folio” and the
television welcome screens feature Shakespeare’s face surrounded by quills (Fig 8). And, in
keeping with the theater theme, according to several websites, all the staff are trained actors.
Most notable, however, is the proximity of The Drama Hotel to several other Shakespeare-

1
Ulula cum lupis cum quibus esse cupis (Latin for “who keeps company with wolves will learn to howl”) is featured
on the front of the Sleep No More program.
2
I was not able to find an official website for The Drama Hotel, even when using non-Google search engines such
as Bing or Duck-Duck-Go. (Google is prohibited in mainland China.) Much of my information has been culled from
design blogs and reviews on hotel booking sites. http://www.yankodesign.com/2017/03/31/dramatic-digs-in-
shanghai/
Figure 8: Entrance to the Drama Hotel (note “First
Folio” at the base of the stairs). RetailDesignBlog.
2017.

70
inspired sites on the premises: Above the
Globe, a bar in the complex, and the
McKinnon Hotel, a faux-hotel that is in
fact the theater space housing the
Shanghainese version of Punchdrunk’s
Sleep No More, an immersive adaptation
of Macbeth. Within this Shakespeare-
plex, located on a busy, bougie corner in
a popular shopping district of Shanghai, it
is possible for a Sleep No More superfan to—very literally-- eat, sleep, and breathe Shakespeare.
(Fig 9).
While the previous two chapters examine the ways in which early modern theater was
inherently immersive, the two final chapters focus on contemporary in-person and digital
contemporary immersive Shakespearean adaptations. Of course, theatrical immersion is not
limited to early modern and contemporary performances; degrees of immersion have been
present in theatrical productions from Dionysian Greek theater to Jacque’s Daguerre’s 19
th

century Diorama to the environmental theater performed by members Fluxus in the 1960s.
However, to focus on how contemporary immersion has been influenced by the past, I have
opted to use Shakespeare as a foundation for my inquiries since so many contemporary
immersive productions likewise incorporate Shakespearean narrative. The historical and
contemporary chapters are in conversation with one another in as much as they both examine
immersive strategies such as audience interaction, site specificity, multisensory cues, ludic play,
and liminal space; additionally, the first two chapters provide the foundation for early modern
Figure 9: Sign marking The McKinnon (the theater hosuing
Sleep No More in Shanghai), Above the Globe and The
Drama Hotel. RetailDesignBlog. 2017.

71
themes that emerge in the two contemporary chapters. Additionally, as mentioned in the
introduction, the physical spaces of early modern and contemporary immersive theaters allow for
more freedom of movement and kinetic processing that is so integral to an immersive
experience.
Contemporary immersive theater adaptations of Shakespeare use liminal, ludic, and
immersive properties to enable audiences to play with Shakespeare. The familiarity of
Shakespearean narratives provides safe containment for people to seek out personal and novel
meaning within these productions. Given the canonical and monolithic nature of Shakespearean
narrative, even audience members who are not deeply familiar with the original source text will
recognize popular references—but in truth, it doesn’t much matter if an audience member has
never given Shakespeare a lot of consideration as one of the key facets of immersive theater is
that the audience member has some agency over making meaning in the production. In her
chapter, “Adapting Time and Place: Avant-Garde Storytelling and Immersive Theater,” Julie
Grossman asserts that the ways in which immersive theater allows for a “decentered” reading of
the original text:
Because in these works the identities of performer and audience member are
merged and the divisions between the stage and a stable separate audience space
dissolved, these immersive theater adaptations model an aesthetics that decenters
sources and adaptations and imbricates readers, viewers, actors, and audiences
into their ‘home’ and newly created texts, privileging an associational
understanding of textual relations.
1

This act of merging audience and actor allows both to be practitioners in the space. All of the
immersive productions that I write about in this chapter enable audience members to engage with
the actors, help enact the narrative, and not just witness but participate in the spectacle—an
experience that I believe might allow audience members to feel more closely yoked to the
emotions of the characters and the catharsis at the close of the narrative.

72
Additionally, all four productions in this chapter in some way obfuscate traditional or
expected Shakespearean dialogue: Ivo van Hove, even when the play is performed in English-
speaking countries, produced Roman Tragedies in Dutch; Coriolan/Us requires audience
members to hear the play through headphones “using silent disco technology”
2
; Hamlet-Mobile
has adapted the original text to sound like an LA-inspired stoner-philosopher slang; and, apart
from the coveted one-to-one dialogues that happen behind closed doors, Sleep No More is almost
totally denuded of language. The prioritization of the built worlds of immersive theater in which
audience and actors inhabit shared space can reinforce and amplify strands of the narratives even
without the original language. For example, in his incisive review of Punchdrunk’s Sleep No
More, WB Worthen notes that the play “spatializes literary character in cognate ways… [and]
the verbal images that guide critical interpretations of Macbeth are visualized here in chilling
detail, and—as they are in classic New Criticism—detached from the narrative and dramatic
logic of the play, to be assembled by an individual spectator’s trajectory through it.”
3
Kathryn
Prince likewise suggests in her piece about immersive adaptations of Macbeth that “immersive
theatre’s blend of intimate experience and sprawling scale might illuminate hidden facets of
Shakespeare.”
4
This blend of “intimate experience” and “sprawling scale” allows the audience
member to come to the story on their own terms, to give more focus to an intriguing part of the
play and ignore others, and to physically investigate the world in which the characters exist. In
short, it has the potential to demystify, decentralize and de-lionize Shakespeare. As I will address
in the section about Sleep No More, some of my best and most thorough information regarding
the Shanghai production came not from speaking to Shakespeare or theater scholars, but rather
from interviewing Sleep No More superfans who maintain blogs about their experiences visiting
the show multiple times… because the superfans are the prolific scholars of the play.

73
This chapter explores three types of immersive productions: the mediatized, geopolitical
worlds in Ivo von Hove’s Roman Tragedies and Mike Pearson’s Coriolan/Us, Lauren Ludwig’s
hip and highly intimate Hamlet-Mobile which was performed at various sites in Hollywood, and
finally, the high-budget, high-price tagged, transnational Sleep No More directed by Felix
Barrett. All of these performances remove the traditional structures, rules, and ethoi of theater
such as a stage and audience seating, and, moreover, embrace polysensorial and ludic elements
that mark successful immersive experiences. Roman Tragedies, first performed in 2007,
combines, in a six-hour, intermission-less performance, Coriolanus, Julius Caesar and
Cleopatra, during which audience members are free to move from traditional theater seating to
the stage, which is designed to appear as a pared-down, modern conference room. Coriolan/Us,
directed by Mike Pearson in 2012, site-specificity scholar and immersive theater practitioner,
adapts Shakespeare’s Coriolanus and Brecht’s unfinished adaptation Coriolan in an intermedial
production taking place in a disused Royal Air Force airplane hangar. The 2015 Hamlet-Mobile,
an “immersive remixed” adaptation of Hamlet, is comprised of eight 15-minute scenes that are
performed both in- and outside of an old Ford Econoline cargo van in Los Angeles to audiences
capped at four people.
5
And finally, I turn to Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More which did brief stints
in London (2003) and Boston (2009) before finding permanent performance spaces in New York
(2011) and Shanghai (2016). The New York and Shanghainese versions of Sleep No More are
extremely similar, yet slight differences illuminate the varying transnational approaches to
Shakespearean adaptation and shed light on how global audiences participate in and contribute to
Shakespeare.

74
Mediatized Trag-Immersion: Ivo Von Hove’s Roman Tragedies and Mike Pearson’s
Coriolan/Us

Upon entering the old-world elegance of the Koninklijnk Theater Carre, or the Royal
Theater Carre, along the grand Amstel canal, I meandered to the sumptuous upper balustrade to
find a seat on the recommendation of the usher who took our tickets. “You may sit where you
please,” and, after she saw us wait expectantly for a cue, she added, “I’d start upstairs.” This
statement in any other theater would seem somewhat loaded, but the usher’s advice at Ivo van
Hove’s Roman Tragedies makes sense. About 20 minutes into the production, the audience was
invited to move from their seats to anywhere in the theater- including the stage—and become
“part of a living scenography.”
6

While Roman Tragedies premiered in 2007, several years after Sleep No More first
opened in London, the production is widely considered to be one of the forerunners of
mediatized, immersive theater.
A mind-boggling six-hour-long
performance of Shakespeare’s
Roman Tragedies (Coriolanus,
Julius Caesar and Antony and
Cleopatra), the intermedial play
unfolds in front of a film crew
that provides medium to close-
up shots of the actors; these
images are then “broadcast” onto large screens that overhang the entire stage as well as smaller
televisions that dot the stage (Fig 10). Actors speak in Dutch and English translations of the lines
Figure 10: Still from Roman Tragedies performed at the Barbican in
London. 2016. Jan Versweyveld.

75
run across the bottom of the screen which serves to heighten the international feel of the
production. In his notes, van Hove addresses the mediatized quality of the play:
The production will be non-stop and it will mirror world politics, which has
become 24/7. The doors of the theatre will remain open to ensure that every
visitor can take a break whenever he/she wants to. Perhaps he/she might miss a
decisive monologue or a political murder, which will change history, but this is
what happens in real life. Roman Tragedies is a production of incessant debates
and decisions, which will become like politics itself.
7

Another mediatized, immersive adaptation of a Shakespearean Roman tragedy, Mike Pearson’s
Coriolan/Us, exchanges ancient Rome for a modern day war-stricken country and highlights the
“era of 24-hour news, of celebrity culture, and of a new global politics.”
8
Invoking Shakespeare
in politicized, mediatized immersive productions is not an entirely new phenomenon: theater
companies have been fraying the fourth wall and employing Bard-centric multimedia collages
since the 1960s, namely, Fluxus (1958-1972) and Richard Schechner’s the Theater Project Group
(1967-1980). James Rado and Gerome Ragni’s 1967 production, Hair: The American Tribal
Love-Rock Musical, quotes Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet within an anti-Vietnam War narrative.
Hair can be retroactively considered to be one of the first commercial musicals to include
immersive elements as the actors moved freely throughout the audience and often invited the
audience members on stage to echo the ethos of “brotherly love” of the 1960s anti-war
movement. Like Hair, both Roman Tragedies and Coriolan/Us use immersion as a political
tactic in the narrative: in both, the audience’s bodies are “part of a living scenography”—or the
“us” in Corionlan/Us-- as the audience stands in for the Roman populus that populates
Shakespeare’s Roman history plays, thus creating a ludic circle of play when audience members
become simultaneous spectators and participants.

76
Although the narrative itself is messy and violent, the stage in Roman Tragedies is
austere, clean, and impersonal feeling, not unlike an airport lounge; as Thomas Cartelli notes,
“van Hove’s stage is everywhere and nowhere at once, trafficking on the uniform look and feel
of the world’s cathected centres of privilege and power.”
9
All of the players in Roman Tragedies
are in modern dress; either jeans and t-shirts to denote younger, less powerful characters such as
Corolanius’ daughter, Volumnia; most of the power players, men and women, wear standard,
drab power suits in neutrals. The liminal space between audience and stage is further dissolved
by the presence of a make-up and hair trailer flanking the stage, and mostly only visible to
attendees who climb up on stage (or who sit to the far right or left). Pascale Aebischer suggests
that van Hove’s decision to bring the back of house forward, so to speak, adapts “the early
modern discovery space’s blurring of boundaries between backstage work and performance” and
“work[s] to promote a reflexive attitude to acting-as-labour.”
10
In addition to bringing the
backstage onto the stage, another aspect of van Hove’s set design that blurs the line between
actor and spectator is the presence of a snack bar on the stage. At one point, I was distracted by
the couple crunching away at their potato chips until I realized that they were just as much a part
of the production as the actors. Not to mention, audience members are actively encouraged to
check their email, gawk at actors in makeup and hair, and buy snacks and drinks from vendors
on-stage alongside the performance. All of which further blurs the boundaries of audience
member as spectator versus audience member as part of the peanut-crunching populus. All three
of the Roman Tragedies feature a white noise in the form of the citizens of Rome who populate
each play. One of Shakespeare’s most famous crowd scenes features in Julius Caesar during
Marc Antony’s oft-quoted eulogy of Caesar in which he requests the ears of his “friends,
Romans, countrymen” (3.2.73). Less memorable, perhaps, but no less resonant is the background

77
noise of the Plebians who hiss and shout their dissents and assents in the Forum of Rome. (I also
bought a large beer and a bag of popcorn and somewhat awkwardly guzzled and crunched my
way through the better portion of Coriolanus, essentially taking the place of the peanut-
munching gawking populus). As Cartelli notes, Roman Tragedies “prompts audiences to adopt
the distracted viewing habits that obtain at professional basketball and ice-hockey games where
the live-screen players have to compete for audience attention with their replications on large
overhead screens and on small vending-station monitors.”
11
In effect, van Hove, within his play,
pushes the boundaries of the liminal qualities of the stage to the extent that he embeds his
production with liminoid events outside of the narrative structure.
Since Pearson is both a site-
specificity scholar and practiotionner, it
follows that Coriolan/Us takes place in
“Hangar 858, a disused World War II
aircraft hangar, at RAF St Athan in the
Vale of Glaumorgan.”
12
As Andrew
Filmer describes in his chapter,
“Coriolan/us and the Limits of
‘Immersive,’” the interior space and its “ribcage-like ceiling resonates with the spoken text,
which is littered with references to the bodies of the people, the singular body of Caius Martius
Coriolanus, to bodily functions, wounds, and scars… reinforces a proprioceptive and haptic
awareness; you too are here, part of the body politic of this event.”
13
(Fig 11).This idea of the
body politic is explicit from the opening of Shakespeare’s play when Menenius speaks in
extended metaphor establishing a hierarchical organization of Rome by framing the capital the
Figure 11: Still from Coriolan/Us. 2012. National Theatre
Wales.

78
“belly” and the mutinous citizen relegated to the “big toe” (1.1.1-152). The set in Coriolan/Us
features disused camper vans and burnt out cars, all of which are filmed by two camera-people
and a CCTV system and then broadcast on screens throughout the performance.
Additionally, the audience members are both surveilling and being surveilled, as they too
are picked up by camera crews and shown on the CCTV system. And, in order for the audience
member to wander unhindered and yet not miss the dialogue, the production provided
headphones so in “a space so cavernous the nuances of the cast’s uniformly and startlingly
impressive performances were never lost.”
14
Like the “24-hour news” that Pearson strove to
capture, audience members were free to roam through the space and peer through car windows
becoming both spectator of a performance and member of the populus surveilling the discord. As
Pearson writes in the program for Coriolan/Us, the play “was always going to unfold amongst a
crowd… the rolling consequences of our choices and reactions accumulating as they ripple on
through the body and structure of a social forum constituted by all those present.”
15
Coriolanus
in particular features unnamed citizens or soldiers in the majority of scenes in the play; the
hulking crowd is always listening, assessing, present.
I have to be honest: while I deeply respect van Hove’s innovative adaptation, I didn’t
much enjoy Roman Tragedies. The play is performed in Dutch with English subtitles running
across the screens, and since I don’t speak or understand Dutch, this contributed to the somewhat
bewildering feeling of the performance. And a six-hour performance, in my opinion, is just too
long. By the time Coriolanus was over, my companion and I were confused by the Dutch
Shakespeare, jet-lagged and hungry so we ventured out for a bite to eat right before the Julius
Caesar segment of Roman Tragedies started. Serendipitously, as we walked through
Roeterseiland along the Amstel canal to return to the play after dinner, we saw the well-

79
documented Enobarbus death scene taking place on the street outside the theatre. The actor
playing Enobarbus was encircled by camera people filming him, and audience members
encircled the camera crew. Although the actor spoke in Dutch, I recognized the scene in which
Enobarbus declares to the moon that he is dying of a broken heart for betraying Antony. The
exterior scene makes clever play of Enobarbus’ repetition of “bear me witness, night,” “be
witness to me, O thou blessed moon,” “O sovereign mistress of true melancholy” (4.9.5, 7, 12).
While I don’t recall if the moon was full or even visible that night, I do remember that, while
within the huddle of actors, camera crew, and audience members, we all seemed as though under
the same spotlight, very much becoming part of a living scenography on the Amsterdam street.

Hamlet-Mobile: Shakespearean Philosophy in the City of Angels

Around 9pm on a fall night in Echo Park, I drank an orange-flavored Gatorade in a van
with a mechanic who told me about a guy who escaped death by dehydration by guzzling a case
of the sports drink. Strange things often happen in LA, but this wasn’t a bizarre happenstance
interaction—it was a ten-minute, one-actor/one-audience member scene entitled “The
Gravedigger Hotboxes the Van.” On their fundraising site, producer Monica Miklas and
playwright Lauren Ludwig describe Hamlet-Mobile as “drawing on the rich history of American
road trips, traveling circuses, and 1970s Venice Beach culture,” which perfectly encapsulates the
breezy, philosophical dialogue delivered by the Gravedigger.
16
Whereas Roman Tragedies,
Coriolan/Us and Sleep No More are all immersive productions with insanely high production
costs, Hamlet-Mobile is comparatively low-tech and low-key, and the $8 ticket price reflects this.
The other productions I examine in this chapter are mediatized, and some might describe their

80
engagement with social media as decidedly slick; for example, Roman Tragedies actively
encourages audience members to live tweet during performances a tag those tweets with a
designated hashtag, and the Sleep No More fan blogs are almost as fetishized and discussed as
the performance itself. Aside from Capital W’s website designed to tell a bit about the show and
sell tickets, the company used digital space only to Tweet the precise location of the scene an
hour before it began. In Hamlet-Mobile, the emphasis is on pithy, site-specific intimacy.
Hamlet-Mobile exhibits ludic, playful qualities of immersion by creating a “magic circle”
with the van itself. In Homo Ludens, Johan Huizinga describes this idea that ludic play is
bounded not only by time but also by space, and within that space there is the freedom to fully
immerse in a new world:
The arena, the card table, the magic circle, the temple, the stage, the screen, the
tennis court, the court of justice, etc., are all in form and function play-grounds,
i.e. forbidden spots, isolated, hedged round, hallowed within which special rules
obtain. All are temporary worlds within the ordinary world, dedicated to the
performance of an act apart.
17

This notion of a protected world which encourages play is echoed by Gary Izzo in his 1997 book,
The Art of Play: the New Genre of Interactive Theater; Izzo defines the Greek term, “temenos,”
or “sacred circle” as a conceptual idea of how play space works: “a thing venerated and
hallowed, secured against defamation, violation, or intrusion; a special protected, and inviolate
space.”
18
I entered into the magic circle, or temenos, of Hamlet-Mobile when I waited at the
south end of Echo Park Reservoir to attend the show, “The Gravedigger Hotboxes the Van.” The
producers had created a “lobby” outside the van by placing blankets and folding beach chairs on
the grassy area adjacent to the reservoir, and cookies were passed around to any audience
members feeling peckish. One by one, we were invited to climb into the passenger’s seat of the

81
van where the performance commenced and truly felt as though it was an “act apart” from the
“ordinary world.”
Immersive as well as movable, Capital W’s Hamlet-Mobile riffs on the notion of the van-
as-stage, the centrality of vehicles in LA, and, perhaps more usefully, on playing with variable
sites of performance. (Fig 12) Because, in Hamlet-Mobile, the audience member who chooses
where and when—and in what
order-- to experience the show that
takes place in locales in Hollywood
and Hollywood-adjacent
neighborhoods. One of the most
notable metatheatrical elements
about Hamlet-Mobile is the variable
site-specificity of this play in and
around Hollywood; furthermore,
Hamlet-Mobile relies on site-specificity to layer meaning on the content of the play depending
upon where it is performed. Moreover, each act is performed singularly in discrete locations, so
that audience members may or may not take in the whole play—and it would be impossible to
see the entire production in one night as the troupe focused on only one or two scenes per night.
The titles of each mini-play in Hamlet-Mobile are as follows, in order of chronological acts
throughout the original play: “Break-Up Sex,” “Girl With Flowers,” “Int. Kitchen. Night,” -
“Advice From Dad,” “Crown/Ambition/Queen,” “The Gravedigger Hotboxes the Van,” “Family
“Feud,” and “An Orgy of Blood and Ashes.” (Fig 13) Each location likewise corresponds with
Figure 12: The stage of Hamlet-Mobile. 2015. Shing Yin Khor.

82
the narrative in each scene; for example,
“Advice from Dad,” in which Hamlet is
visited by the Ghost of King Hamlet, was
staged at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. I
watched Hamlet-Mobile’s adaptation of the
play-within-a-play Mousetrap scene, “The
Dumb Show,” outside of Bootleg Theater
where the van was tucked away in an alley. As the actors pantomimed Claudius murdering King
Hamlet, the smell of stale beer wafted out from the small concert venue on Beverly Blvd while a
band did sound check. Watching the actors perform a show in front of a van behind a small,
gritty music venue was, at times, slightly dizzying in its self-consciousness. Especially as
someone who used to live in LA and frequent these places, watching Hamlet-Mobile gave a very
eerie sensation of experiencing two worlds collide. Gay McAuley untangles these issues of
performances staged in locales outside of a traditional theater space in her article, “Place in the
Performance Experience”: “The performance may be inspired by the place, or it may.be a means
of exploring and experiencing that place…. it may play at the interface of experiences of the real
and the fictional.”
19
Since Hamlet-Mobile is performed in popular public spaces, one of the
pleasures of the play is noting the areas in which “the real and the fictional” collapse.
Just as the titles of each scene are pithy and clever while contemporizing the issues in
Hamlet, the dialogue is likewise updated and rendered more casual. The scene I mentioned prior,
“The Gravedigger Hotboxes the Van,” updates Hamlet 5.1, the scene in which Hamlet and
Horatio come across the Gravedigger and the Clown digging Ophelia’s grave in preparation for
her burial. The two whistle as they work, so to speak, which at first infuriates Hamlet and he lists
Figure 13: “Break-Up Sex” scene. 2015. Shing Yin
Khor.

83
all the illustrious people who might be being tossed around by the gravediggers, such as “the
pate of a politician,” “a courtier,” or “the skull of a lawyer” (5.1.72, 76, 90-91). but then he
comes around and says to Horatio: “Alexander died, Alexander was buried, Alexander returneth
into dust, the dust is earth, of earth we make loam, and why of that loam whereto he was
converted might they not stop a beer barrel?” (5.1.192-195). In Hamlet-Mobile, the Gravedigger
is written as a stoner mechanic-slash-philosopher who waxes poetic about futility of money and
the inevitability of death. While he “fixes” his van, the character delivers his earthy monologue
that, when compared to the Shakespearean text, is a rejoinder to all the naysaying Hamlet speaks
in the original play.

GRAVEDIGGER: You see a wrench over there, brother?
[The audience member finds a wrench. The GRAVEDIGGER smacks the engine
a few times with the wrench. Then he closes the hood, satisfied.]
My point is: the value of every human life is absolute. It doesn’t matter if you
made Warren Buffet money or lived on welfare or killed someone or birthed a
thousand kings. Whatever you gave or took, we end up in the same place. And
people remembering your name later doesn’t make you not dead. The longest-
lived and those who die soonest all lose the same thing. The present is all that
they can give up, since that is all you have, and what you don’t have, you cannot
lose.
20

The physical comedy of watching the mechanic ‘fix” the van by whacking it with a wrench
echoes the dark comedy of the Clown and the Gravedigger toss around skulls in Hamlet. But in
Hamlet-Mobile, the audience member is “in the grave” with the Gravedigger so to speak, sitting
in the van drinking Gatorade and talking about the inevitability of death. Moreover, not only is
the dialogue updated to cite Warren Buffett rather than Alexander the Great, but the role of
learned philosopher is stripped from Prince Hamlet (even more so that the character is entirely
omitted from the scene) and instead given to the Gravedigger. Like Grossman’s point that

84
immersive theater “decenters” original sources, Hamlet-Mobile reframes the original scene from
Hamlet to suggest that it is not Hamlet who comes to realize the inevitability of mortality, but it
is rather the Gravedigger who is the scholar possessing the wisdom from the start.
Ludwig notably insists upon intimate, audience-actor interaction throughout each of
Hamlet-Mobile’s mini-play, even going so far as to include notes in her script such as directing
the audience member to rummage through a toolbox to find a wrench for the Gravedigger
mechanic. The acting is so natural with multiple pauses to ask simple questions of the audience
member, that at times I believed that the actor was tailoring his performance to me and my
reactions (after reading Ludwig’s script, I realized that he was not). In her notes, Ludwig adopts
a laissez-faire attitude about altering future renditions of the play, though she has one rule
predicated on the scale of the show: “most of the pieces are intended for audiences of one or two
people. Whatever else changes in each production, don’t change that. Intimacy is the currency of
Hamlet-Mobile.”
21

Pay for Play: Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More
3

Just as in many traditional theater experiences, the use of cell phones in Sleep No More is
verboten. In both New York and Shanghai, Sleep No More attendees are asked to check all
belongings before entering the prologue-esque 1930s jazz club-slash-speakeasy in which
audience members are invited to have a cocktail and cavort with actors in character before
entering the show proper. However, since in China a majority of products can be purchased by

3
Portions of this section were written for a chapter I wrote about the transnational discourse in Sleep No More
between the American and Chinese productions in The Global Shakespeare Encylopedia, forthcoming 2023.

85
scanning QR codes with smart phones, many attendees at Sleep No More Shanghai keep their
phones on them in order to buy drinks at the bar. And, like the average smartphone owner
worldwide, if someone has access to their phone, they will use their phone. When I visited Sleep
No More in Shanghai, the majority of attendees were checking email, watching videos, taking
selfies—in essence, rather than immersing themselves the lavish pre-performance, audience
members were immersed in their phones. And yet Punchdrunk cleverly severs audience members
from their phones during the play: guests may only gain access to the central performance by
allowing an usher to lock their phone in a small cloth carrier which the audience member then
must carry for the duration of the play. In this regard, Sleep No More cuts each audience member
off from their technological strings to the outer world, which forces the audience to immerse
themselves in the here and now of the play.
One of the most influential Shakespearean immersive productions is undoubtedly
Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More, directed by Felix Barrett and Maxine Doyle. Even despite tickets
with a bottom price of roughly $150 in both New York and Shanghai—and scalped tickets can
creep to upward of $500-- neither the American nor Chinese production shows any indication of
closing.
4
Multiple plots occur simultaneously throughout the 100,000-square foot “stage” (four
floors in New York and five in Shanghai), and, upon entering Sleep No More, audience members
are encouraged to break from their friends and explore the play solo.
22
While the pacing and
choreography have been tightly prepared so that audience members are lured to different areas of
the play by actors and ushered en masse into rooms for apex scenes, the experience during large
swaths of the production feels like a choose-your-own adventure play. In addition to the lush

4
Tickets for the New York show were priced at $149.50 each as of May 2022. https://mckittrickhotel.com/sleep-no-
more/#/tickx-widget

86
visual sets designed by Barrett, Livi Vaughan, and Beatrice Minns and the bone-rattling sound
design by Stephen Dobbie, aromas of leather, pine, and rose permeate the performance spaces;
the guests also engage their sense of touch by invitations to rummage through drawers to read
letters, and, during the play, guests can sip cocktails in a themed bar or sample candies in an old-
time penny-candy shop. Sleep No More offers the experience for audience members to enact a
canonical narrative with their bodies; as Josephine Machon writes in Immersive Theatres, “the
prioritisation of all human senses, not just sight and hearing, opens up (and requires) a new
taxonomy for holistic appreciation in immersive theatres.”
23
As participants, we are not just
expected to hear the play, but to truly rely on our other senses and thereby enter a world of non-
linguistic discourse.
A pertinent example of yoking immersion and intermediality
5
, SNM enacts the “aesthetic
idioms” of immersive video game narratives “driven by exploration and direct interaction.”
24

Much more so than Roman Tragedies, Coriolan/Us or Hamlet-Mobile, all of which employ
immersive practices while adhering to a linear script, Sleep No More requires the audience
member to actively play within the play to make meaning of it. Many of these tactile, kinetic
elements provide clues, and function in a video game aesthetic as “embedded narratives”; Henry
Jenkins notes that melodramatic plots are ripe for embedded “as we read letters and diaries,
snoop around in bedroom drawers and closets, in search of secrets which might shed light on the
relationships between characters.”
25
Speaking about Sleep No More specifically, Janet Murray

5
Intermediality is generally characterized by two or more interacting media; for example, a play featuring video
footage brings together multiple layers of narrative to create a media-rich, holistic work. See Daniel Fischlin
OuterSpeares: Shakespeare, Intermedia, and the Limits of Adaptation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014);
Lars Ellestrom, “The Modalities of Media: A Model for Understanding Intermedial Relations.” In Media Borders,
Multimodality and Intermediality. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

87
notes that the “detailed set designs that mimic the interactive spaces of mystery-themed
adventure games in which objects are meant to be examined and evaluated as potential solutions
to game puzzles, often involving revelations of backstory,”
26
and perhaps even more enticingly,
Murray notes that “we can think of the Punchdrunk productions as a kind of holodeck experience
in real space.”
27

One of the ways in which Punchdrunk encourages audience members to step out of their
comfort zones and engage with the
production is to wear a white mask
(actors are distinguished by their bare
faces). (Fig 14). According to Barrett,
these masks (identical in China and the
U.S.) contribute to a “sense of
anonymity” and “allow people to be
more selfish and more voyeuristic than
they might normally be.”
28
Given the
resemblance to masks worn during Venetian carnival, the subtext is one that we are entering a
carnivalesque “world upside down.”
29
Additionally, the masks provide a striking image of the
audience as ghostly figures scattered throughout scenes. The mask has become an emblem of
Sleep No More, especially in Shanghai where fans can purchase commemorative Budweiser
bottles featuring a red-washed image of the famous mask. (Fig 15). (Of course, Budweiser
Figure 14: Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More, Macbeth and Lady
Macbeth dance as audience members watch the scene.
2011.Yaniv Schulman.
1

88
sponsors Sleep No More Shanghai along with Kans, a
Shanghai-based cosmetic company; Punchdrunk has
additionally created “brandscapes” for Absolut, Stella
Artois, the W Hotel and Louis Vuitton.
30
) And, at least of
what I observed in Shanghai, the mask is also a signifier of
one’s fan-status: I noticed several attendees wearing
multiple masks that they had stacked on top of another
indicating the number of times that they had seen the
production. Ironically enough, what most audience
members crave most when attending Sleep No More is to
be unmasked by an actor, which only happens during one-on-one experiences between a Sleep
No More actor and audience member. These interactions are shrouded in mystery and are not at
all guaranteed, so Sleep No More superfans covet these rare interactions to learn more about the
narrative and experience an intimate moment with a member of the cast. As Thomas Cartelli
notes, “the desire to be unmasked, to be recognized or acknowledged, if not exactly known,
seems to be one of the primary informing motives behind the craving of SNM’s fan-base for one-
on-ones.”
31
Joanna Bucknall argues in her 2016 article, “Liminoid Invitations and Liminoid
Acts: The role of ludic strategies and tropes in immersive and micro-performance dramaturgies,”
that liminoid acts occurring within immersive liminal spaces, such as one-to-one experiences
with actors, are “micro-performances” that offer the allure of the “the potential of this space that
is radical or charged…holds a tension that charges the space through possibility and
potential.”
32
(Emphasis is Bucknall’s.) J.D. Oxblood recounts his own one-on-one experience in
Sleep No More as the ultimate in crossing a liminal threshold and (I hope intentionally)
Figure 15: SNM branded bottle of
Budweiser in Shanghai. 2017 Laura
Leslie.

89
hilariously describes the experience as “something akin to eating carpaccio off the nude body of
a lover: extremely intimate, overwhelmingly satisfying, and tinged with the possibility for
revulsion.”
33
In this regard, the mask becomes something that provides comfort in its ability to
provide anonymity and yet is likewise tinged with the titillating and terrifying possibility that it
might come off.
Given the relationship between performance, space and site-specificity in immersive
productions, the buildings that house the Sleep No More productions are likewise extensions of
the narratives. After the play in Shanghai, attendees can keep imbibing on site at the
Shakespeare-themed bar, Above the Globe. The adjacent Drama Hotel boasts that it is the first
theater- and Shakespeare-themed hotel in the city. Upon arrival, guests are not given a room
number but rather a series of clues that lead them to one of 26 rooms, each named after a
Shakespearean play. The first floor of the Drama Hotel is instead referred to (in English) as the
“First Folio,” and the television welcome screens feature Shakespeare’s face surrounded by
quills. And, in keeping with the theater theme, all of the staff are trained actors. The Drama
Hotel’s logo features a Sleep No More-esque mask, and several reviews note that guests will find
masks of all sorts decorating the hotel. Whereas the Shanghai site feels pristine and refined since
it was built to be a mega-Shakespeare-plex, the site of the New York production in Chelsea is
intentionally gritty-feeling. Prior to housing Sleep No More, the location was part of New York’s
raucous “Club Row” and hosted “multiple super-clubs including Sound Factory (1989–1995),
Twilo (1995–2001), B.E.D. (2005), Home (2005), and Guest House (2005).”
34
Emursive, the
parent company that owns the site of Sleep No More in New York, has built a type of play-plex
which includes two restaurants and a bar. Although none of these venues are Shakespeare-

90
themed, they are “immersive dining experiences” that echo the eerie 1930s cabaret vibe of Sleep
No More.
Sleep No More’s name is taken from the following line in Macbeth: “Methought I heard a
voice cry, ‘Sleep no more! / Macbeth does murder sleep’” (2.2.33–34). Despite a number of
borrowings from the Scottish play – the main characters in Sleep No More are Macbeth, Lady
Macbeth, Banquo, Macduff, Lady Macduff, Duncan, Hecate, and the Three Witches – the
production has not been considered a faithful Shakespearean adaptation.
6
This is in part because
it is denuded of language and features references to other narratives, namely, Daphne du
Maurier’s gothic novel Rebecca (1938) and Alfred Hitchcock’s films Rebecca (1940) and
Vertigo (1958). But this omission of language is perhaps a reason that the play has transnational
appeal: since the actors very rarely utter a word, they replace dialogue with a more universal
body language and dance. Doyle’s choreography is both incredibly evocative and incredibly
demanding; for example, performers leap over bars, climb walls, dance within small, enclosed
glass spaces, and crawl along bookshelves to convey anguish and madness. As WB Worthen
notes, Sleep No More’s fidelity to Shakespearean text is that of a visual textuality as it
“[remakes] a network of verbal imagery as the scenic landscape of performance.”
35
In both
productions, the richly assembled performance space coupled with the emotive, silent dance-
acting creates an environment tense with Macbethian motifs including blood, animals, and
witchcraft. And the inclusion of Hitchcock’s voyeuristic and film noir influences as “the show
expresses Macbeth’s and Hitchcock’s shared fascination with desire and power in its
configuration of audience members as voyeurs reaching beyond the stable role of static

6
Matt Kozusko’s 2012/2013 edited section of Borrowers and Lenders, “Site, Space, and Intimacy: ’s Immersive
Intertext,” includes articles by Thomas Cartelli, Collette Gordon, J.D. Oxblood ,Pamela J. Rader, Sophia Richardson
and Lauren Shohet; Kozusko and Oxblood both describe Shakespeare’s Macbeth as a “Macguffin.”

91
viewer.”
36
New York’s Sleep No More is set during the 1930s in the McKittrick which is also the
hotel featured in Vertigo (part of Dobbie’s sound design likewise adapts the Vertigo soundtrack).
Furthermore, the Manderley Bar in New York takes its name from Manderley, the old, haunted
estate in Rebecca.
In addition to the Shakespeare, Hitchcock and du Maurier references, Sleep No More
Shanghai also introduces the Chinese folktale, “Legend of the White Snake” into the mix, which
parallels that of the witches in Macbeth. The two productions reveal how references to Macbeth
are further mapped onto familiar cultural narratives by examining the mode in which Macbeth is
bewitched by the Weird Sisters and inspired to act out “horrible imaginings” of murders in order
to be king (1.3.137). As Alexa Alice Joubin writes in her chapter, “Global Shakespeare Criticism
Beyond the Nation State,”
Performing Shakespeare in worldwide theatre is a process of incorporating
multiple voices into one artwork. It is a tug of war between competing voices
across time and space. Performance styles borrowed from other cultures can help
retool some plays and aid directors in search of new values. The global is
constructed through local personas and specific local practices.
37

In the New York production, this scene depicts a hyper- sexualized witches’ rave. The actors,
some nude, don bullheads like Maenads worshipping Dionysus and place Macbeth on an altar
while they writhe around him. The scene, one of the most popular, features strobe lights, fake
blood, and a thrumming techno soundtrack. The conflation of sex and evil is laced through
history but by casting the witches as temptresses instead of genderless hags the production sells
heady sexuality as part of the play. In the Shanghainese production, the sexual nature of the
witches’ rave is omitted. The “Legend of the White Snake” shares themes with Macbeth, such as
the good versus evil dichotomy and the desire for immortality, and the basic plot follows a
female white snake who ingests a magical medicine in order to become human so she may

92
pursue a romantic relationship with a human man.
38
This inclusion of a shape-shifting female
character parallels the witches in Macbeth; furthermore, the legacy of the legend in Chinese
popular culture has evolved into a love story which echoes the Macbeths’ dark love story.
(Additionally, “Legend of the White Snake” is one of the four Great Chinese Folktales, another
of which is called the Butterfly Lovers and is often compared to Romeo and Juliet.) Instead,
Macbeth’s turn to darkness is conveyed by the witches placing him on the altar and force-feeding
him alcohol. This pivot from sexual intoxication to intoxication by alcohol echoes themes in
“Legend of White Snake” and also “un-sexes” Shakespeare, which is similar to the chastened
versions first introduced to China in 1904 by Lin Shu translating Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales
from Shakespeare (1807). Since the Lamb’s Victorian abridged interpretation was a simplified
version of Shakespeare intended for children and women but retained the essential plots of each
play, as such, Lin’s translations of the plays are allegorical extensions of the originals yet firmly
rooted in a traditionalist, Confucian framework that “capitalized on Victorian critical ethics and
exaggerated the potential for moral instruction in Shakespeare.”
39

The audience inclusivity of Sleep No More coupled with dense fan-driven conversations
about the production on social media outlets underscore how immersive productions and digital
worlds and the afterlife of Shakespearean texts are created by a multiplicity of participants. In
addition to posting where to find Easter Eggs in the production and how to unlock more secrets
within the narrative, fans are likewise exploring Shakespeare vis-à-vis Sleep No More and can
“often become a space for users to re-introduce the Shakespearean text... outside of the
performance space [of Sleep No More].”
40
The concurrent productions on two continents have
amplified voices of fans globally, creating a cross-pollination effect of how western and eastern
audiences interpret Sleep No More. Authors of Tumblr accounts such as “Drink the Halo”,

93
“Blood Will Have Blood, They Say,” “Remember the Porter” and “Behind the White Mask” are
SNM super fans who visit the play repeatedly and post detailed notes about their experiences.
41

For example, the blogger who writes “Behind the White Mask” has seen SNM in Shanghai 85
times, and Laura Leslie, blogger behind “Drink the Halo,” is a longtime superfan who gets early
access to most Punchdrunk tickets and shows. Leslie, who gave me permission to share her name
and Tumblr handle, has been generous enough to speak with me on several occasions about any
translations that I needed from Mandarin to English or clarifications about certain character arcs.
Though Leslie is based in NYC, she travelled to Shanghai five times to see SNM a total of 34
times.
42
Pascale Aebischer points to these on-line spaces as liminal performance sites: “in the
ever more ‘symbiotic relationship’ developing between companies and their regular audiences,
fans derive pleasure from their sense of agency as they interact with performers and theatre
companies even as the latter benefit from the ‘buzz’ and free publicity provided through the fans’
labour.”
43
In a certain regard, these online communities offer a way for superfans to replicate the
process of mastering, or at least engaging with, Shakespearean allusions in Sleep No More.
In the alleyway leading to the
witches’ speakeasy on the Shanghainese
set of Sleep No More is a blood red neon
sign with Mandarin characters. The scene
is unique to Shanghai, one of darkened
alleyways and shop stalls over lit with
paper lanterns, and, if you linger a
moment to watch it, the characters flicker
on and off, thus altering the meaning. The sign roughly translates to “Garden of Eden,” or
Figure 16: Speakeasy sign “Garden of Eden/Corpse.” 2016.
Yuan Studio.

94
“Paradise,” but it flickers to the character for “corpse,” so the secondary implication is “Garden
of Death.”
7
(Fig 16) The ominous meaning behind the fizzing neon indicates Macbeth’s slippage
from valor into downfall and is likewise a reminder of the flickering presence of Shakespeare
within the world of Sleep No More—a world that extends from stage to social media to
commodification and back again. I have attended Sleep No More in both New York and
Shanghai, and the age discrepancy between the productions suggests that Shanghai has cornered
the youth market: the crowd in New York is primarily composed of people aged 30-50 whereas
the audience in Shanghai was decidedly comprised of enthusiasts in their early twenties. While
the elitism deployed at both sites is at times galling (the cost prohibitive tickets, the branded
beers) it is also clear that Sleep No More has ushered in a new fan base of Shakespeare’s
Macbeth.
~
Each of the four productions here works to evoke emotion from the audience members by
putting them in a more active, physical place within the story. van Hove’s Roman Tragedies is
cold, inaccessible and forces the audience member through a marathon performance thus
creating significant fatigue. Pearson’s Coriolan/Us, though I have not experienced it first-hand, I
imagine puts the audience member in the role of war reporter: dodging vehicles, peering into
windows, getting swept into crowds. Ludwig and Miklas’ Hamlet-Mobile is undoubtedly the
coziest of the four performances examined here, and blends meditations on mortality with a laid
back surfer vibe. And Sleep No More physically creates a world of Macbeth’s dark guilt and
paranoia, of the “dagger of the mind, a false creation/ Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain”

7
I kindly received this translation from Laura Leslie, writer behind the Tumblr page, “Drink the Halo.” on
November 27
th
, 2017. http://drinkthehalo.tumblr.com/

95
(2.1.38-39). All four of these immersive Shakespearean adaptations are radically different, to be
sure. And yet, by inviting the audience members to step inside the narratives, they all offer the
potential for the audience to find new meanings in the story and experience new connections to
the characters by staging the productions in a decentered, immersive world.

96

Chapter Four

~

“Wander Everywhere”: Virtually Immersive Shakespeare

Over hill, over dale,
Thorough bush, thorough brier,
Over park, over pale,
Thorough flood, thorough fire,
I do wander everywhere.
--A Midsummer Night’s Dream 2.1.2-6

In April 2021, during the Covid pandemic, I attended the Royal Shakespeare Company’s
Dream, an adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that promised to immerse audience
members in a “virtual midsummer forest.”
1
I loitered in the lobby until the performance began—
only I was already seated in the comfort of my own home, and the “lobby” was created by a
screen with a clock ticking down the
seconds until the performance began. (Fig
17) Dream, a motion-captured,
interactive, and live performance, was
produced at the Guildhall in Portsmouth,
UK, a venue with a capacity of 2,200
people, and yet I joined over 7,000 other
audience members—more than double the amount of audience members that the Globe theater
could accommodate in Shakespeare’s day. Using motion capture technology and Unreal
Figure 17: Screenshot of “lobby” at the remote
performance of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Dream

97
Engine’s 3D game engine, the RSC made it possible to “wander everywhere” from home.
1
Like
many other theater enthusiasts during the height of the pandemic, I watched distanced
performances to break the despair about the global health crisis and the monotony of sheltering
at home, and Dream offered a whiff of collective experience that I was so badly missing.
In my final chapter, I examine mediatized Shakespearean adaptations, and, moreover, I
seek to understand whether productions using digital immersion are truly immersive or rather
distant kin to immersive theater. It is easy to envision how wearing a virtual reality headset can
immerse a participant visually and aurally, but how are the fleshy, palpable qualities of
immersive theater such as audience interaction, site-specificity and multi-sensory cues accounted
for? What happens to the interplay of liminal and ludic spaces in digitized narratives? Does the
omission of in-person liveness in these digital and largely remote immersive adaptations dampen
the impact of Shakespearean performance? Or are they instead an innovative way, as Gregory
Doran, RSC artistic director emeritus notes, to give “audiences of different ages a shared point of
connection across the generations and, if that experience also has Shakespeare’s imagination
behind it, that’s got to be a good thing”?
2

Just as immersive theater practices are not limited to the early modern and contemporary
immersive theater periods, emergent technologies have likewise worked to enhance immersion
between Shakespeare’s heyday and the advent of augmented and virtual reality technologies. To
the horror and delight of 17
th
century audiences, actor David Garrick famously wore a
mechanized “fright wig” in William Davenant’s production of Macbeth to convey Macbeth’s
horror when seeing the ghost of Banquo. The 19
th
century brought such theatrical innovations

1
UnReal Engine was first used by the RSC for the 2016 production of The Tempest to generate a motion-captured
Ariel.

98
such as gas lighting, which allowed for greater control of lighting on stage and darkness in the
audience and thereby heightened the immersive aspect of watching a tableau unfold on stage.
And of course, the advent of film technologies in theaters advanced the sensation of being
immersed in a new world. For instance, there is the urban legend about late 19
th
century
audiences running from the Lumiere brothers’ footage of an oncoming train, or the iconic image
from the 1950s of a theater full of enrapt viewers wearing 3-d glasses.
While the 2022 landscape of performance is saturated in mediatized and digital
immersion, this chapter first looks to the early adopters of technology in intermedial
Shakespearean adaptations, such as the Hamlet adaptations produced by the Wooster group and
Annie Dorsen. I then examine the ludic and pedagogical potentials for using virtual and
augmented reality to teach Shakespeare by looking two productions in great detail, the
Commonwealth Shakespeare Company’s 2019 film, Hamlet 360: Thy Father’s Spirit and The
Royal Shakespeare Company’s Dream. Hamlet 360 demonstrates elements of full visual, sonic
and kinetic immersion into a virtual stage world of Hamlet, and I write about the pedagogical
potentials of the project when I taught this adaptation of Hamlet to a group of Mellon digital
humanities students at the University of Southern California. And Dream is a sterling example of
lockdown creativity that combines liveness with several facets of immersive theater, namely
audience interaction, liminal spaces and polysensorial experience. While most of the digitized
Shakespearean productions are still in nascent technological stages and do at times seem thin or
glitchy, my goal is to illuminate how Hamlet 360 and Dream offer rough cuts of how technology
could meld with live performance and allow a wider swath of audiences to access these
narratives.

99

Predecessors of Digital Immersion: fluxus and Intermedial Adaptations of Hamlet
Pre-VR and AR days, performances that utilized digital properties were largely
intermedial, meaning that the live performance was interspliced with media (usually projected on
screens). Intermedia are interdisciplinary art forms that fuse two or more genres into one work.
3

Both intermedia and multimedia pieces mix visual, sound, performance and digital art into one
piece; however, multimedia pieces juxtapose various mediums whereas intermedial pieces seek
to become new mediums.
2
And intermediality is not unique to the digital age. As Stephen
Greenblatt asserts in his 1997 essay, “The Interart Movement,”
the dominant media of our time—television, film, and popular music—depend, as
did the Elizabethan theater, upon the intersection of arts: words, images, music,
dance. Our great art forms are for the most part collaborative enterprises that
depend on creators with different areas of expertise talking and working with one
another.
4

2
Portions of this section on intermedial inheritances are taken from a definition of intermedia that I wrote for the
Electronic Literature Directory (https://directory.eliterature.org/e-lit-resource/5041) and review of Ken Freidman’s
edited book about Dick Higgins, Intermedia, Fluxus and the Something Else Press: Selected Writings by Dick
Higgin that I co-authored with Virginia Kuhn, “Many Lives to Live” (https://electronicbookreview.com/essay/many-
lives-to-live/).

100
While seeking to understand how intermedia influenced contemporary immersive theater, it’s
helpful to look to fluxus, the
1960s art movement that
championed experimentation
and a lack of fixity to
preconceived notions of genre;
moreover, the origins of
intermedia and fluxus have
intimate ties with immersive
productions. In 1965, Dick Higgins, founder of fluxus and the Something Else Press, coined the
term intermedia to describe fusions between art forms that he both witnessed and created during
the 1960s.
5
Yet, since intermedial artists didn’t yet have the vast bounty of digital tools that
contemporary media artists play with, the works appear, in retrospect, very immersive. For
example, Marta Minujin’s La Menesunda (1965), is an intermedial installation that blends
performance art, video montage, painting, sculpture and sound to create a multisensory
experience that recreates the sensation of being on the frenetic streets of Buenos Aires. (Fig 18)
Viewers walk through eleven rooms, including such playful spaces as dark hallways laced with
sizzling neon tubes, a pink-walled salon in which makeup artists invite visitors to play with
makeup and fragrance, and a mirrored room featuring fans that blow gusts of pastel-colored
confetti up into the air and all over visitors. Alison Knowles, another fluxus intermedia artist,
pushed boundaries of book genre both creating immersive spaces and paving the way for
Figure 18: Marta Minujin’s La Menesunda. 2015. Courtesy Museo de
Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires. Photo: Josefina Tommasi

101
electronic literature some several decades later.
Knowles’ 1967 project, “Big Book,” is an 8-feet
tall, 16-page-long book complete with a tunnel,
bathroom facilities, kitchenette and telephone--
essentially a book meant to fully immerse the
reader and encourage her to read non-linearly. (Fig
19) In her article, “Genuine Thought is
(Inter)Medial,” Julia Meier touches upon this
inherently physical quality of intermedia when she
describes how aesthetic vibrations between discrete
media can elicit synesthetic pleasure between
textual and human “bodies.” Moreover, Meier asserts that through this overlap of sensory
perception, audiences can generate novel experiences that transcend “intelligible thinking” in
favor of sensorial absorption:
what we conceive is basically the vibration—the clash in-between things, the
process of becoming other… therefore reshaping our own senses... the detour of
the brain, in which intelligible thinking would take its time and place, is cut off,
and information can only be sensed.
6

Aesthetic vibrations within the “in-between” spaces of intermedial installations such as
Minujin’s and Knowles’ allow for such visual, aural, and sensorial collisions that were inroads to
current immersive works, both analog and digital. Fluxus artists’ interest in erasing the line
between art and the spectator’s body by placing the viewer within a polysensorial built space is
akin to live immersive works such as Sleep No More and putting on a VR headset in order to
wander through a built digital world.
The Wooster Group’s 2005 production of HAMLET and Annie Dorsen’s 2013 A Piece of
Figure 19: Alison Knowles. “Big Book.” 1967.
Anagram Books.

102
Work are both intermedial and
likewise have ties to fluxus. (And
for a notable piece of performance
trivia further linking the two plays,
actor Scott Shepherd played
Hamlet in both Wooster Group’s
HAMLET and Annie Dorsen’s A
Piece of Work.) HAMLET, which
ran from 2005 to 2013, depicts actors performing Hamlet in front of Richard Burton's 1964
version of the play. HAMLET repurposes and remixes the original script with the 1964 Burton
film which “is a literal filmed record of the stage production in which three performances were
recorded….and then edited into a single film.”
7
Invoking Marvin Carlson’s “repository of
cultural memory,” the Wooster Group’s HAMLET creates a self-referential feedback loop
between archival footage and live performance. (Fig 20) While Shepherd’s acting in front of and
alongside Burton can be viewed as a commemoration to the deceased actor and the legacy of
Hamlet on stage, A Piece of Work is decidedly post-humanist, or, as WB Worthen calls it, “a
deformance of Hamlet,” as the algorithm dictates the show.
8
It locates key terms in the play and
projects them on the back wall of the stage according to pattern; it breaks down and rebuilds
soliloquies according to grammatical structures; it generates new dialogue by re-arranging words
from the play; and it generates a new final scene using Markovian chain sequencing.
9
(Fig 21)
The one act that features a human actor, played by either Shepherd or other Wooster group
affiliate, Joan MacIntosh, who must deliver lines according to the “computer’s choices of the
night, hearing a one-time-only script through an in-ear feed.”
10
Both HAMLET and A Piece of
Figure 21: Annie Dorsen’s A Piece of Work. Algorithmic re-
imagining of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. 2013. Bruno Pocheron.
Figure 20: Scott Shepherd as Hamlet. 2011. Paula Court.

103
Work continuously and
painstakingly draw attention to
the fact that they are not driven
by live human actors, and both
feature titles are likewise
referential to this mediatized
approach to theater. The Wooster
Group plays almost cheekily with
themonolith of Shakespeare with it’s all-caps HAMLET, and perhaps also alludes to the double
dose of Hamlet that the audience takes in during the performance. And Dorsen’s title, A Piece of
Work, is a snippet from Hamlet’s existential declaration, “What a piece of work is man!”
(2.2.251-252) winks at the unusual performance as “a [real] piece of work,” and likewise plays
with the multiple meanings of “work,” such as to create, to do arithmetic, to labor thus hinting at
the combined effect of the coding and the acting working together on stage. Likewise, digital
immersion during VR and AR performances requires audience labor for the production to be
successful.

Virtual Reality Hamlet: Digital, Bodily, and Pedagogical Immersion in Hamlet 360
Just as the Wooster group and Annie Dorsen chose Hamlet as the narrative on which to
map intermedial practices, the tragedy is likewise the most popular of Shakespeare’s plays to

104
plug into virtual reality technology.
3
And it makes sense that Hamlet would be the VR guinea
pig. Not only is Hamlet iconic, but the play also possesses the cultural cachet that lends emergent
and experimental technologies credibility amongst naysayers or purists. Moreover, as Rebecca
Bushnell writes in her piece about why Shakespearean narratives are so conducive to video
games, Hamlet is “the consummate player, the actor who mimes his own madness, who deploys
theatre as a cat-and-mouse game with Claudius, and who spars with his antagonists, either
verbally with Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, and Polonius or physically with Laertes.”
11
This game-
like quality in Hamlet likewise lends itself to VR, since the medium requires the user to actively
engage and move around the built world.
Hamlet 360: My Father’s Spirit certainly plays on the “consummate player,” as well as
sensorial language and the spirit of discovery in Shakespeare’s play. I studied this production
with a small group of digital humanities students at the University of Southern California during
the summer of 2019, and we found it to be a useful tool for exploring stage practices in Hamlet.
Although the qualities of immersive theater present somewhat differently in virtual reality, the
aural and visual immersion in Hamlet 360 is of course extremely obvious once the viewer dons
the VR headset. The liminal and site-specific qualities of immersion somewhat collide in this
production, as the film was shot on location in a disused theater, and the ludic action is a
necessary byproduct of VR as one moves around the built digital world. Most surprisingly, the
kinetic quality of VR drew out an unexpected polysensorial quality in the play: what one student
referred to as “physical empathy.”
4
The kinetic difference between watching Hamlet 360 and a
classic film or play experience is immediately apparent: the viewer must not only mentally but

3
Since 2017, there have been three notable virtual reality adaptations of Hamlet: To Be With Hamlet,
http://hamletvr.org/, Hamlet 360, https://www.wgbh.org/hamlet360 and the 2019 VR project from CMU/Prof.
Stephen Wittek that excerpts scenes from Hamlet, shx-vr.com.
4
The digital humanities students kindly gave their consent for me to share their insights in this chapter.

105
also physically work in order to keep up with the action inside the play. Whereas in a play we see
a tableau before us, and in a film we are told where to look by the director, in VR we are often
forced to seek out who is speaking, who is listening and who is moving. For example, the
mounting confusion in the Mousetrap scene is physically played out because, as one student
pointed out, the viewer can’t watch the dumb show, Claudius’ reaction, and Hamlet’s reaction to
Claudius at the same time-- you have to swivel your head back and forth, crane your neck, stand
and walk around the room, or sit in a swivel chair to rotate with the action in our headsets. This
shift radically changes the physical dynamics between audience member and actor and helps to
establish something akin to physical or kinetic empathy with the characters.
To fully experience immersion in VR, the viewer must partake in “digital swimming,” or
the phenomenon of being plunged into something new that creates a fresh sense of excitement
and alertness because we are forced to learn the new rules of the new world. As Janet Murray
explains in Hamlet on the Holodeck, “in a participatory medium, immersion implies learning to
swim, to do the things that the new environment makes possible. This chapter is about such
digital swimming, about the enjoyment of
immersion as a participatory activity.”
12

Murray’s work feels eerily prophetic
when considering Hamlet 360: of course,
the VR technology doesn’t allow the
audience freedom of choice in the theater
like the mythical holodeck from Star Trek
does, but it strives to do so. Water connotations aside, a scene in Hamlet 360 that feels truly
immersive and forces us as viewers to “swim” is one in which the actor playing Hamlet plunges
Figure 22: Screenshot of Cutmore-Scott underwater.

106
in and out of water in a bathtub. (Fig 22) The scene opens with a medium shot of Jack Cutmore-
Scott, the actor playing Hamlet, fully dressed and sitting in a claw-footed bathtub, reciting the
famous lines “to be, or not to be, that is the question” (3.1.56). This choice to show Hamlet
unhinged and in semi-indulgent repose as he contemplates suicide is a familiar one. But, as
Hamlet moves into the second movement of his soliloquy that considers the balm of death as a
sleep to “end the heart-ache,” Hamlet and the camera plunge underwater. Bubbles rush out of
Cutmore-Scott’s mouth as he delivers the turn in thought:
To die—to sleep
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to: 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd (3.1.64).

As the viewer watches Cutmore-Scott acting underwater, it feels disorienting and suffocating but
also uncannily sensuous. We are given the choice to lift our gaze up and out of the water at any
point, which echoes the sentiment of choice in the “to be or not to be” soliloquy, and the way the
scene is directed presents as an opportunity to reflect on the various twists and turns in Hamlet’s
circuitous thought processes. The digital humanities students are all sophisticated readers of film
and theatrical performance (some are even stage directors and actors), we all agreed that the
more literal directive to plunge Cutmore-Scott underwater would be particularly helpful for all
readers, especially those who are less familiar with the text. Laced into the gee-whiz underwater
photography is an intimacy that we don’t often experience by watching theater or film
performance.
Commonwealth Shakespeare Theater director Steve Maler and cinematographer Matthew
Niederhauser, the creators of Hamlet 360: My Father’s Spirit, chose to adapt Hamlet for its
spatial and emotional intimacy, and, in particular, for the peculiarly intimate relationship

107
between Hamlet and the Ghost. Maler addresses the thematic interiority of the play, explaining
that “This is an intimate play. It's a play that asks, you know, Who am I? Why am I? To me, that
intimacy made perfect sense for us to use this very intimate medium to tell this story.”
13
And
Neiderhauser had to match the intimacy through camerawork and “rethink blocking and staging,
almost so that you are playing it out for an ideal audience member of one.”
14
Maler chose to
place viewers in the vantage point of the Ghost since “a man who's in purgatory… [is] a prism
through which to see the play that made sense for the medium, really.”
15
The effect of stepping
into the role of the Ghost is truly a disorienting, disembodied one. Firstly, although the title nods
to the Ghost’s centrality in this adaptation, the viewer’s role isn’t clear until about five minutes
into the action when the Ghost appears
and speaks to Hamlet (the original text
equivalent to 1.5). Before this, the only
hint that we are the Ghost is when we
look down at the floor and appear to be
hovering several feet off of it with a white
mist below our feet—again, the viewer must labor to understand where they fit into the narrative.
And, of course, this disembodied viewpoint jars against the character’s ghastly, corporeal
language, that of purgatory as his “prison house,” the “leperous distillment” poured into the
“porches of mine ears,” his blood turned into “posset and curd,” and his body covered in a “vile
and loathsome crust” (1.5.14, 64, 63, 68-69, 72). This tension between flesh and spirit is
heightened by the stage direction that every time the Ghost speaks, the lights flicker and Hamlet,
who otherwise looks through us, appears to be locking eyes with us. At other points during the
play, when we seek out mirrors, we see the reflection a 65-year-old-ish man vigilantly watching

108
Hamlet. (Fig 23) By the final scene, it seems as though the Ghost is released from purgatory: the
camera shifts us into a birds-eye view of the stage, and the actor playing the Ghost walks through
the carnage of dead bodies lying on the stage.
The stage and set design in Hamlet 360 teases at the edges of liminal spaces of the theater
and site-specificity. As Richard Schechner writes in his seminal book, Performance Studies, “an
empty theatre space is liminal, open to all kinds of possibilities: a space that by means of
performing could become anywhere,” and we see this clearly in the undone feel of the Hamlet
360 set.
16
The play was filmed on site at an “abandoned Vaudeville theater on Staten Island,”
which lends to the dilapidated feel of the production as well as establishes a self-aware nod to
inheritances of theatricality.
17
During the play, the viewer can gaze up and see the lighting
system, unused ladders, fabric swaths, boxes, spare CAN lights, and sundry stage detritus in the
corners of the theater; the set proper is strewn with overturned chairs a rocking horse, clocks, a
broken down car, a vase holding fencing foils, and, all over the floor, floor lamps and fallen
chandeliers. In terms of staging, there is plenty to bring into class discussion such as the
psychological aspect of Hamlet’s
childhood remnants strewn across the
stage, the dystopian imagery of the abundance of overturned furniture, and the Oedipal symbol
of Gertrude’s bed on display.
My class watched Hamlet 360 together in the VR lab at USC, and, despite using the most
expensive gear available to us, we all experienced motion sickness, headache, and eye strain,
also known as cybersickness.
5
Hamlet 360 cuts much of the original text so the run time is under

5
I should note that all of us in the class are women, and significantly more women than men apparently suffer from
motion sickness while using VR—though after culling through a number of studies about cybersickness, about 50%
Figure 23: Ghost reflected in mirror depending on our
vantage point. Screenshot.

109
an hour and even this feels uncomfortably long— my students and I collectively agreed that we
could watch the film for a maximum of 20 minutes before experiencing cybersickness. We
discussed how this physical discomfort that would be jarring or distracting in a comedy helped
engender affinity for Hamlet’s displacement in the narrative.
6
Ultimately, while some physically
immersive elements were less impactful through VR, this “physical empathy,” while unpleasant,
certainly accounted for an enhanced sensory experience.

“These Visions”: The Royal Shakespeare Company’s Virtual Midsummer Dream

The influx of Zoom and distanced performance during the 2020-2021 Covid lockdowns
reshaped this chapter to focus on more sharply if and how immersion can be experienced in
isolation and from home. In her topical book, Theater of Lockdown: Digital and Distanced
Performance in a Time of Pandemic, Barbara Fuchs notes that “the theater of lockdown involved
a shift to digital modes of creation and delivery, whether or not the digital played any role in the
content of the work” and additionally argues that companies making “site-specific or
experimental work moved more inherently online. For them, Zoom was inherently no more or
less challenging an environment than a castle or a swimming pool or an empty warehouse—it
was simply a question of figuring out its possibilities.”
18
In this sense, especially during the
pandemic, digital spaces like Zoom or Oculus headsets or web streaming platforms became
locales—or, as Pascale Aebischer notes, “from site-specific to platform specific.”
19

of all users regardless of gender suffer from motion sickness after participating in VR for 15 minutes. See this article
for research on VR and sickness. Lee, Jiwon, Mingyu Kim, and Jinmo Kim. "A Study on Immersion and VR
Sickness in Walking Interaction for Immersive Virtual Reality Applications." Symmetry, vol. 9, no. 5, 2017, pp. 78.
6
Niederhsauser developed other psychologically-inclined narratives for VR use, such as Sigmund Freud’s
Interpretation of Dreams and Lincoln in the Bardo.

110
By using an interactive platform and a rich visual and sonic soundscape, the Royal
Shakespeare Company recreated an immersive, communal experience with Dream, their “virtual
midsummer forest” based on A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Additionally, Dream embraced the
spirit of liveness by using improvisational methods to foreground the serendipitous nature of in-
person theater. To capture large audiences, Dream was made free and offered throughout the day
and night (including staging one performance at the eye-watering time of 2am GMT). For a
donation of £10, audience members could interact with the performance by using their mousepad
to hover “fireflies” or throw “seeds” over areas of the plays split-screen geomap; the actors could
see these objects as pins of light on the motion capture stage and thus amend their movements to
follow where the audience led them.
(Fig 24) This ludic actor-audience
playfulness is likewise evident in Puck’s direct addresses to the audience and mimics the liminal
qualities of prologues and epilogues in traditional theater productions. Although Dream borrows
sparsely from Shakespeare’s script, the dialogue highlights elements from the original narrative,
such as contagion and the healing potentials of nature and human interaction, that parallel issues
that arose during the Covid
pandemic.
Although Dream is billed as a
50-minute production, the
performance proper is condensed into
a 25-minute narrative with a buffer of
ten minutes at the beginning to get
Figure 24: Users click on the black portion of the screen; the
pinpoints of white light indicate other users’ “seeds”

111
acquainted with the rules of the game and 15 minutes at the end allotted for Q and A with the
actors. Pippa Hill, RSC’s dramaturg, generously shared with me over email her process of how
the script development for Dream came about. Hill explains:
I had three versions of the script which we took into rehearsal. I created a non-
verbal, stage directed version, a version in verse and a version in contemporary
dialogue. One of my key research questions was how comfortably sixteenth
century verse would integrate into a games engine. It became clear very early on
in rehearsals that the actors felt most excited by the verse. We all felt that the
world of the wood we had created was heightened and required heightened
language to navigate it. I created the verse version of the script by taking lines
from the play and weaving them into a new narrative, we added lines as we
rehearsed and I rewrote throughout the process.

In order to match the otherworldliness of the UnReal forest, Hill’s script draws most of its
influence from Titania’s scenes and brings forward the magical elements of Midsummer. In
particular, Hill uses Titania’s “these are the forgeries of jealousy” monologue as a metaphor for
the world during the pandemic. Hill notes that “there’s something in the language about the
familiar things that we love being taken away or turned upside down or being
removed.”
20
Additionally, Titania’s words to Oberon are the source of inspiration for the storm
that threatens to ravage the landscape in Dream: “…the winds…/ As in revenge, have suck’d up
from the sea/ Contagious fogs” (2.1.88,89-90) and “…the moon, the governess of floods,/ Pale in
her anger, washes all the air,/ That rheumatic diseases do abound:/ And thorough this
distempature we see/ The seasons alter” (2.1.103-105). And, of course, Titania’s passage not
only provides imagery of nature in crisis but of “contagious fogs” and “rheumatic diseases” that
echo the infectious nature of the Covid pandemic.
In addition to noting the ominous overtones in Dream, it’s crucial to note that the March
2021 premier of Dream coincided with a wave of optimism during the pandemic. Vaccines were
widely available in the US and UK, and
Figure 25: Screenshot of Puck and Moth meeting in the
enchanted forest.

112
many experts and media sources projected that a return to normalcy—and perhaps even a
celebratory “hot vax summer”-- was on the horizon.
7
Even though RSC’s Dream eliminates the
entire marriage plot, themes of celebration are evident in scenes of rebirth, rebuilding and new
growth at the end of the adaptation. Additionally, the narrative framing of A Midusmmer Night’s
Dream, that of city-dwelling Athenian’s leaving the city to spend a magical night in the forest,
parallels the experience of the audience
member escaping the reality of the
pandemic for a brief foray into the UnReal
forest. The springtime premier of Dream
echoes the end of Midusmmer when
Theseus sees the four lovers sleeping in the woods and says that “they rose up early to observe/
The rite of May” (4.1.129-30). The “rite of May” refers not only to the Roman pagan ritual of
ushering in spring or May Day, but also the Elizabethan England springtime custom of “young
men and women of all classes [going] out into the woods and fields to welcome the May with
singing and dancing.”
21
The period during which Dream was being watched worldwide marked a
moment in time during which we collectively believed the Covid pandemic might ebb away by
the summer, thereby giving a tangible quality to a collective spring fever.
The basic premise of Dream is that a storm is threatening to destroy the forest, and Puck
must seek out Moth, Peaseblossom, Cobweb and Mustard Seed—and finally, the audience— in
order to restore peace and fertility to the forest. The first half of Dream is a quest

7
I am not aware of first- or secondhand accounts from people in countries where the vaccine was not widely
available who attended Dream, however, I can imagine approaching the narrative from a less optimistic viewpoint.
Figure 26: Maggie Bain’s eyeball as Cobweb

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narrative in which Puck speaks to all the other
forest denizens. The play opens with Puck
speaking to The Forest (voiced by musician
Nick Cave), and the guests are instructed to
cast their “gloworms” or cursors over the forest
to see the terrain. During the play, Puck’s
avatar appears cobbled together with large pieces of gray flint and their movements resemble
wooden figure-drawing models. Puck’s hands were drawn as stones rather than individual
fingers, and this rock formation was perhaps a practical choice for the motion capture
technology. Each character likewise has a somewhat nebulous form: Moth, is a moth-shaped
cloud swirling with many small moths to create a larger whole (Fig 25); Peaseblossom is a
thorny rosebush in the shape of a knight’s suit of armor; Mustard Seed, by far the most gestural
figure, is a root with an earth-toned face; and Cobweb, perhaps the creepiest—and coolest—
animation, is a spiderweb-ensconced eyeball nestled in the hollow nook of a tree (Fig 26), and
Mustard Seed, by far the most gestural figure, is a root with an earth-toned face. In “Beyond
(the) Dream,” a talk about the research and development behind the project, Maggie Bain, the
actor who played Cobweb described her process to convey gesture during digitized acting with a
motion capture suit. Bain describes the three elements for Cobweb’s movements, demonstrating
how “the eyelids open and close using my hands,” “the distance between my hands controls how
open or closed that eye is,” and “the iris is controlled by my feet to the distance so coming
forward should make the iris bigger and back the iris much smaller, and then the movement of
my head controls where the iris is looking.”
22

114
The second portion of Dream steps
out of the forest animation and reveals the
logistics of the motion capture technology. A
gradual thick, light gray fog ebbs onto the
screen that gives way to a barren landscape,
and the camera pans out to show a dying
Puck on the screen and actor in motion-
capture gear in front of the screen on the
sound stage. The other actors carry a writhing Puck around, which looks on the screen as though
they are floating over the barren landscape (Fig 27). The audience is invited to send rejuvenating
“fireflies” to Puck; the screen splits, we can see EM Williams’s body in motion capture as well
as Puck projected on the screen behind them and the paying audience members are invited to
launch a small firefly onto the topographical map. Puck beseeches the audience to click beads of
light on the landscape in order to create regrowth, as when Peter Pan asks the children in the
audience to clap if they believe in fairies so as to save Tinkerbell’s life—this theme of humanity
banding together to salvage the forest parallels to campaigns to shelter in place or vaccinate in
order to quell Covid infections. The split screen closes, and we are rewarded with images of
tender shoots bursting upward from the forest floor. Our screens, which up to now have been
colored in dark blues, blacks and grays, are now washed in the warm colors of sunrise and the
closing tone of the play is calm and reparative.
Figure 27: EM Williams lifted by other cast; screen
behind them indicates the illusion of Puck floating
through the forest landscape

115
As with many creative endeavors that were sidetracked due to the pandemic, the tech-
heavy elements of Dream emerged as a sort of happy accident that built upon a 2016 RSC
production of The Tempest.
Originally, the production was
meant to be an in-person and online
performance, but, after the theater
closures in the UK, Dream was
amended to be a research and
development collaboration between
the RSC, the
ManchesterInternational Festival,
Marshmallow Laser Feast and the Philharmonia Orchestra.
23
The RSC expanded on the
technology they developed with Intel and the Imaginarium studios for the 2016 production of
The Tempest to digitally enhance Ariel.
24
Mark Quartley, the actor playing Ariel, acted onstage
in his own body and as a digital avatar by wearing costume fitted with motion capture
technology (Fig 28).
In Dream, motion capture technology is at the forefront of the production, and the
production cleverly reveals the mo-cap technology during the play’s prologue and in the second
half of the play to tease the
boundaries of liminal spaces in the
theater. Dream opens with Puck,
playfully played by EM Williams,
who greets us in a motion capture
Figure 28: Prospero playing with a motion-captured image of Ariel
in RSC’s 2016 performance of The Tempest. 2016. Topher
McGrillis.
Figure 29: Screenshot of EM Williams in their motion capture suit.

116
suit and reiterates the rules of the game before ushering us into the forest. (Fig 29) Seeing
Williams in their motion capture suit with their N-95 mask around their neck toes the line
between the reality of the pandemic and the fantasy about to unfold in the UnReal forest. Hill
graciously shared her methodology for choosing Puck as the guide for Dream in an email to me.
I have excerpted part of Hill’s email with her permission here :
Direct address to the audience was a joyful discovery in rehearsal. It’s a bit of
Shakespearian dramaturgy we pinch a lot in our new work at the RSC as it works
so brilliantly on our thrust stages, but we didn’t know whether it would read on
the avatar puppets who largely had no facial expression or eye contact with the
audience (except Cobweb!). Puck as a mischievous and unreliable guide was very
compelling and we knew we needed a charismatic guide who could straddle the
magical and non-magical elements of the play. We were very keen to take the
audience into the experience with a trusted actor who could literally walk the
audience backstage into the volume and then take us into the forest. EM Williams
and Phoebe Hyder were brilliant at this role.

In his final address to the audience in Midsummer, Puck beseeches the audience to “give [him]
your hands, if we be friends” (5.1.429-430) and blurs the line between the narrative within the
play and the here and now of the theater. While Puck’s final line can be construed as asking the
audience to applaud, many productions direct Puck to shake hands with audience members.
Williams’ direct address into the camera likewise comingles dream and reality and helps to draw
the audience members at home into the theater space.

117
One key facet of immersion is attention to the polysensorial and interactive experiences.
It is easy to envision how wearing a virtual reality headset can immerse a participant visually and
aurally, but how are the fleshy, palpable qualities
of immersive theater such as audience interaction,
site-specificity and multi-sensory cues accounted
for? One Shakespearean company addressed the
olfactory component of remote, lockdown theater
by including an opportunity to purchase perfume in
conjunction with their interactive StoryMaps
adaptation of Macbeth, “The Last Syllable.”
25
The
Independent Shakespeare Company of Los
Angeles collaborated with Black Phoenix Lab to
create two fragrances so audience members could “anoint thyself” at home while experiencing
“The Last Syllable.” The fragrance is described as smelling of “bog and castle, moor and
battlefield, chivalry and nightmare: scarred leather armor, moss-covered stone, shadows upon
shadows, and billows of black incense.”
26
The RSC addressed the polysensorial facet of
immersion by inviting the audience members to engage sensorially even before the show begins.
Outside the performance in the digital lobby, “Tips for Dream” invites the audience to “put on
your headphones,” grab “your favourite drink,” “dim the lights,” and “turn off other devices to
immerse yourself fully” (Fig 30). Not only is this practical advice to enhance the remote
performance experience, but the RSC cleverly mimics the rules of traditional theater to create a
replica for the audience at home.
Figure 30: The RSC encouraged guests to create
their own sensorial, immersive experience at
home.

118
Once the play begins, the soundscape swells with sounds of the forest at night: wind,
rustling and crunching leaves, a “rushy brook,” animal calls, branches snapping, and birdsong,
all accompanied by a lone harp.
Additionally, the score,
performed by the Philharmonia
Orchestra conducted by Principal
Conductor & Artistic Advisor
Esa-Pekka Salonen and features
excerpts from Salonen’s Gemini
and Jesper Nordin’s Ärr, was
designed to be improvisational
and respond to the movements of the actors.
27
The music responds to the live performance with
Nordin’s “interactive music tool Gestrument,” which “allows the performers to generate music
from their movements” that remains in perfect sync with the orchestral score-- the “recordings
are expanded by music in real time by the movements of the performers” thereby creating a
“living, dynamic soundtrack.”
28
Likewise, the interactive component to throw “gloworms” or
“seeds” is not only offering engagement for the audience, but also for the actors on stage (Fig
31). During a q & a following the performance, the actors noted that they can “see” the audience
as lights on the screen when we use the interactive tools to send fireflies and seeds into the world
of Dream; Jamie Morgan (Peaseblossom) said the interactive element gave him “a buzz” akin to
performing before a live audience, and EM Williams (Puck) noted that the actors follow the
lights cast on the screen so the performance is somewhat improvisational. Moreover, as I would
imagine most audience members attending Dream have at least some affinity for Shakespearean
Figure 31: EM Williams in the motion capture suit; split screen
indicates where to position and click mouse to launch the “fireflies.”
By clicking on “drag me,” audience members could “throw” lights
onto the stage.

119
theater, the qualities of polysensorial, interactive experience narrative harkens back to the Globe,
when accounts of crunching chestnuts, smoke and catcalls filled the daylit theater and created a
heady, sensual experience.
For all Dream’s sophisticated aesthetics and brilliant management of technology, the
show was more research and design than traditional performance—and this quality rankled some
viewers. Dream had many critics, most of whom suggested that the narrative was too scant for
true Shakespeare aficionados or that the technology too rudimentary for fans of AR and VR
technology. New York Times critic, Alexis Soloski, described Dream as “gorgeous” and
technologically “sophisticated,” but worried that the RSC created a project in which
“Shakespeare is the pretext not the point.”
29
Nick Wayne, reviewer at the independent London
theatre blog, Pocket Sized Theatre, found Dream as hovering neither here nor there; he also
opined that “if you are a gamer used to the multi-player world then you will see this experience
as substandard. If you are a theatregoer desperately seeking a substitute for the live production,
you will find it inadequate.”
30
However, I think these reviewers are missing the point: Dream
was a project originally intended to be performed live that had to pivot due to the Covid
pandemic. Moreover, the team at RSC made huge advancements in research for future
performances, both live and remote and live and in-person. Although a pre-recorded performance
would allow for 360-camera movement and look more immersive, the live aspect of Dream
created a sense of greater affinity to the actors and other audience members and generated a
feeling of community many of us missed during the pandemic. In “Beyond (the) Dream,” RSC’s
director of digital development Sarah Ellis explained how the team considered just what
audiences might want to see during the pandemic, and, most notably, how to reach the widest
possible audience with the resources at hand. Ellis says,

120
audiences were craving togetherness, they were craving liveness but there is a
huge digital inequity in people’s homes so as we look at the privilege of what we
do—and it is a privilege to be part of this… we have to make work that might
compromise the interactivity, it might compromise the artistic vision but what it
does is connect with audiences and make them imagine and make them feel part
of a future.
31

In their talk, Ellis continued to explain that during the eight performances of Dream in March
2021, over 65,000 people from 92 countries attended Dream-- an astounding average of 8,125
people per show. Moreover, Ellis noted that 40% of the audience were from Generation Y and
Generation Z, which ultimately achieves Gregory Doran’s vision that the RSC attract
intergenerational audiences to Shakespeare.
32
In the words of Doran, that, to me, seems like a
very “good thing.”
~
But, now that the pandemic seems to be inching closer and closer to a stable state and
theaters have reopened, where do we go from here? Is virtual reality, as creative director Chris
Milk promises in his Ted Talk, the “ultimate empathy machine”?
33
Milk partnered with the
United Nation’s to film “Clouds Over Sidra,” a VR experience that follows a 12-year-old girl
named Sidra through her daily life in a Syrian refugee camp. The documentary is particularly
disarming because we experience the camp alongside Sidra’s childlike vantage point as we
follow her to places such as her school’s computer lab and the makeshift pitch where she and her
peers play soccer. As Milk notes, viewers feel a deeper affinity to Sidra because “when you look
down, you're sitting on the same ground that she's sitting on. And because of that, you feel her humanity in
a deeper way. You empathize with her in a deeper way.” When we watch Hamlet 360, my students and I
experienced a kind of kinesthetic empathy for Hamlet when the medium made us feel motion sick. But can
the same be said for emotional empathy when we are interacting with another human experience digitally?

121
During the pandemic, I missed people. I missed experiences. I missed being jostled and feeling
too warm during a crowded performance and too chilly during a show in a drafty theater. I missed in the
fleshy-ness liveness. But, one of the beautiful qualities of remote, live productions, such as Dream,
is that even though we are communing through a screen, we are seeing the production with other
people. As Janet Murry muses at the close of Hamlet on the Holodeck,
storytelling is a constant of human society, allowing us to share meaning across
the campfire, proscenium stage, the printed page, the glowing screen or the VR
headset. As we increase our modes of engagement from listening, reading and
viewing to include navigating, enacting, and interacting, the future of narrative
remains the same as it ever was: to deepen human understanding and widen our
circles of connectedness.
34

So much of immersion is visual and aural, and virtual reality artists and designers have created
stunningly beautiful looking and sounding built worlds. Considering that productions such as
Hamlet 360 and Dream allow for large audiences to attend affordable theater from a distance, the
continued research and development investments are poised for great gains in future VR and AR
productions that meld liveness, distance, and motion capture technology. I attended Dream with
colleagues spanning nine time zones—we came from Los Angeles, San Diego, Wyoming,
London and Berlin. In a year when connecting with friends happened mostly over Zoom, it was
exciting and warming to attend a theater production with a group of people in real time.

Special thanks to Emily Hawkins, Taylor Kass, Jane Keranen, Marii Krueger and Hayley Pike
for their research of Hamlet 360.

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Epilogue

~

“Adieu, Adieu, Adieu!”:
When Immersive Theater Ends

For the finale of Sleep No More, the audience is gathered en masse into the ballroom for
the final banquet scene. While we’ve previously watched characters dance and dine here, now
the dance floor is crowded with staggeringly tall, several-stories-high, faux pine trees: the “Great
Burnam Wood to high Dunsinane Hill” has come for Macbeth. A long table is set on a dais for a
banquet with characters living and dead, and the whole scene is bathed in a lurid chartreuse light;
the actors move slowly and exaggeratedly, as though they are pushing their limbs through a
thick, sticky substance. “Diner” by Angelo Badalamenti-- an eerie mélange of heartbeats,
electronically altered orchestral warmups, deflating strings, and intense white noise written for
David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive-- plays so loudly you can feel the music in your bones. The
actors lead Macbeth ceremoniously and slowly to a noose that descends from the ceiling. A
spotlight shines on Macbeth as he rests the noose on his head like a crown before slipping it
around his neck. He steps off the table, we hear a loud cracking noise and his body swings
violently above the audience. The ballroom goes dark.
Soon after, warm house lights come up in the ballroom and Glenn Miller croons the
words from “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square”…. “I still remember how you smiled and
said, Was that a dream or was it true?” The audience is ushered into the Manderley Bar, lively
and bright, and invited to order a 1920s-cocktail from the bar where the band has started to play
again. Groups of people sip cocktails and mill about; most share their experiences about the play

123
before heading off into the night.
1
This practice of bringing the audience gradually back to reality
through convivial connection echoes the early modern practice of ending performances with
dances and jigs. While Shakespeare’s comedies ending in marriages often have melodies
embedded in the last acts, such as those in As You Like It and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, it is
understood that jigs concluded most plays.
2
Both early modern and contemporary immersive
productions usher audience members back to reality with music and libation before they meander
home-- or perhaps to continue their revelry in one of the many alehouses dotting Bankside, or
one of the many bars adjacent to the Sleep No More theater in the Chelsea neighborhood of
Manhattan.
When I began this project in 2017, there was a deluge of interest in and reference to
immersion across a multitude of different areas such as film, art museums, virtual reality
experiences, and even hotels, restaurants, and marketing launches. Placing Shakespeare at the
center of this research made sense as so many immersive theater companies test novel strategies
using Shakespearean narratives; moreover, I felt a strong hunch that immersion wasn’t just a
passing fad, but rather an important and relevant way to newly read or reconnect to stories
physically and kinetically. For the first several years of my research, I had the great fortune to
attend immersive theater productions in Los Angeles, New York, and Denver; Shanghai, London
and Denmark. It was exhilarating and inspiring to travel all over the world, meet new people, and
immerse myself in immersive theater.
But then, while in the middle of researching and writing my final chapter on digital
immersion, the Covid pandemic shuttered any shared, in-person event. Theatrical productions,
especially physically intimate shared spaces found in immersive theater, became verboten

124
seemingly overnight. The pandemic forced audiences to access performance remotely, which put
creative pressure on how immersion can happen digitally and from home. The silver lining of the
pandemic was that it helped me to radically rethink digital immersion in terms of audience
interaction, site-specificity and multisensory experience. I was fortunate to teach the virtual
reality Hamlet 360 pre-pandemic with a group of students at USC in the Media Arts and
Practices lab, but it was the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Dream that really stretched the
capabilities of how immersion—and human connection--could be experienced digitally and
remotely. In some ways, what has become more interesting to me about this project is not the
contemporary in-person immersive plays that initially inspired me, but rather how early modern
immersion and digital immersion engage with spatial and sensorial immersive theater tactics.
I came to realize even more acutely that immersion invites audiences to play with
Shakespeare both during the play and after the production-proper has ended. So many immersive
performances, both in-person and digital, invite continuing interaction on blogs and social media,
so the conversation is driven by audience members who are not necessarily scholars but fans
who painstakingly record details and bring a new perspective to the Shakespearean canon.
Additionally, immersion has many pedagogical inroads as well. Even though attending Sleep No
More in Shanghai would be inaccessible to many educators and students, digital performances
such as RSC’s Dream are easily accessed with just a phone, tablet, or computer. The ability to
immerse oneself in canonical narratives and manipulate various digital aspects of the
performance has the potential to render stories more relatable and approachable to students.
While writing this dissertation, Ariel’s lines from The Tempest hovered in the back of my
mind. At the onset of my research, I assumed that the sea change in immersive theater was truly
“strange” and new. But, over the course of my research, I realized that the sea change in

125
immersive Shakespearean adaptations was perhaps not strange, but rather a rich inheritance of
the kinetic, playful mode of attending early modern theater during Shakespeare’s heyday. I like
to imagine that contemporary immersive theater adaptations, both in person and digital, polish
the familiar Shakespearean narratives to view in a new light, like bones becoming coral and eyes
becoming pearls.

126

127

Notes

Introduction

1
Josephine Machon, Immersive Theatres: Intimacy and Immediacy in Contemporary Performance. London:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2013; Julie Grossman, Literature, Film, and Their Hideous Progeny: Adaptation and
ElasTEXTity. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
2
Richard Schechner, Performance Studies, 3
rd
edition. New York: Routledge. 2002; Victor Turner. “Frame, Flow
and Reflection: Ritual and Drama as Public Liminality.” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, vol. 6, no. 4, 1979.
465–99; Johan Huzinga, Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture. London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1944.
3
R.A. Foakes. “Shakespeare’s Elizabethan Stages.” Shakespeare: An Illustrated Stage History. Eds. Jonathan Bate
and Russell Jackson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996: 21.
4
David Harris Sacks, “London’s Dominion:The Metropolis, the Market Economy, and the State.” Ed. Lena Cowen
Orlin. Material London, ca. 1600. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. 22.
5
'September 1642: Order for Stage-plays to cease.', in Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, 1642-1660, ed. C H
Firth and R S Rait (London, 1911). 26-27. British History Online. http://www.british-history.ac.uk/no-series/acts-
ordinances-interregnum/pp26-27
6
Michael Dobson. “Improving on the Original: Actresses and Adaptations.” In Shakespeare: An Illustrated Stage
History, edited by Jonathan Bate and Russell Jackson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996: 47.
7
Gabriel Egan. “Playhouses.” The Cambridge guide to the worlds of Shakespeare. Ed. Bruce R. Smith. Cambridge
University Press, 2016. Vol. I. 94.
8
Ronnie Mulryne, “Physical Structures.” The Cambridge guide to the worlds of Shakespeare Vol. II, Smith, Bruce
R., 1946 editor. Cambridge University Press, 2016. 1429.
9
Sleep No More. Punchdrunk website. https://www.punchdrunk.com/
10
Sleep No More. Program. “Interview with Felix Barret and Maxine Doyle.” 21-29.
11
Frieze, James. “Reframing Immersive Theatre: The Politics and Pragmatics of Participatory Performance.” James
Frieze, ed. Reframing Immersive Theater. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2017. 16
12
Alexa Alice Joubin. “Global Shakespeare and Criticism Beyond the Nation State.” The Oxford Handbook of
Shakespeare and Performance. Ed. James C. Bulman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. 424.
13
Ibid., 426-427.
14
Clifford Geertz. Interpretation of Cultures. New York, Harper Collins. 1973. 318.
15
Richard Schechner, Performance Studies, 3
rd
edition. New York: Routledge. 2002. 2.
16
Ranciere, Jacques. The Emancipated Spectator. Trans. Gregory Elliott. London: Verso, 2009. 13.
17
Ibid., 4.
18
Ibid., 16-17.
19
Sleep No More. Program. “Interview with Felix Barret and Maxine Doyle.” 21-29.
20
Nicholas Bourriaud. Relational Aesthetics. Trans Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods with the participation of
Mathieu Copeland. Paris: les presses du reel, 2002. 14.
21
Claire Bishop. Installation art : a critical history . New York: Routledge, 2005. 6.
22
Nicholas Bourriaud. Relational Aesthetics. Trans Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods with the participation of
Mathieu Copeland. Paris: les presses du reel, 2002. 16.
23
Claire Bishop. Installation art : a critical history . New York: Routledge, 2005. 6.
24
Josephine Machon, Immersive Theatres: Intimacy and Immediacy in Contemporary Performance. London:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. 73.
25
Frieze, James. “Reframing Immersive Theatre: The Politics and Pragmatics of Participatory Performance.” James
Frieze, ed. Reframing Immersive Theater. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2017. 10.
26
Alston, Adam. Beyond Immersive Theatre: Aesthetics, Politics and Productive Participation. London: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2016. 3.
27
Ibid., 3.
28
“Site Specific.” Tate Modern. April 1, 2018. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/s/site-specific
29
Alston, Adam. Beyond Immersive Theatre: Aesthetics, Politics and Productive Participation. London: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2016. 109.
30
Michel de Certeau. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkley: University of California Press, 1984. 93.

128

31
Mike Pearson. Site-Specific Performance. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. 35.
32
Ibid., 43.
33
Ibid., 36.
34
Marvin Carlson. The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan
Press, 2003: 2.
35
Ibid., 134.
36
Gay McAuley. Space in Performance: Making Meaning in the Theatre, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press,
1999. 47.
37
Gay McAuley, “Place in the Performance Experience” Modern Drama, Volume 46, Number 4, Winter 2003. 600.
38
M. “Some of the Questions About Hamlet's Castle.” The Christian Science Monitor. Jun 19, 1926. 9.
39
Niels B. Hansen. “Gentlemen You Are Welcome to Elsinore: Hamlet in Performance at Kronborg Castle,
Elsinore.” Shakespeare and His Contemporaries in Performance. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2002. 109.
40
“Immerse.” Oxford English Dictionary. Accessed September 13
th
, 2017
41
Scott Lukas. The Immersive Worlds Handbook: Designing Theme Parks and Consumer Spaces. Oxford:
Routledge; 2012. 121.
42
Ibid., 200.
43
Punchdrunk. Sleep No More. New York City. October 23, 2015. https://www.punchdrunk.com/
44
Third Rail Production. Sweet & Lucky. Denver, CO. June 12, 2016.
https://thirdrailprojects.com/sweetandlucky#salpage
45
Capital W. Hamlet-Mobile. October 27, 2016. https://www.threeeyedrat.com/hamletmobile
46
Stephen di Benedetto, Stephen. “Scenography and the Senses: Engaging the tactile, olfactory, and gustatory
senses.” The Routledge Companion to Scenography. Ed. Arnold Aronson. Abingdon, Oxfordshire: Routledge Press,
2017. 72.
47
Mark Blankenship. “What’s Smell Got to Do With It?” American Theatre Group. February 24, 2016.
https://www.americantheatre.org/2016/02/24/aroma-turgy-whats-smell-got-to-do-with-it/
48
Leslie Hill and Helen Paris. Performing Proximities: Curious Intimacies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
2.
49
Josephine Machon, Immersive Theatres: Intimacy and Immediacy in Contemporary Performance. London:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. 11.
50
Leslie Hill and Helen Paris. Performing Proximities: Curious Intimacies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
10.
51
Victor Turner. “Liminal to Liminoid, in Play, Flow, and Ritual: An Essay in Comparative Symbology.” Rice
Institute Pamphlet - Rice University Studies, 60, no. 3 (1974). 85.
52
Michel Foucault. “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias.” Ed. Leach, Neil. “Rethinking Architecture: A
Reader in Cultural Theory.” Rethinking Architecture: a Reader in Cultural Theory, Routledge, 1997. 334.
53
Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1944. 8.
54
Ibid., 10.
55
Gary Izzo, The Art of Play: the New Genre of Interactive Theater. Portsmouth, NH: Heineman Drama. 1997. 9.
56
Janet H. Murray. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. New
York: The Free Press, 1997. 124-125.
57
Ibid., 125.
58
Brett Greatley-Hirsch and Michael Best. “‘Within this Wooden [2.]O’: Shakespeare and New Media in the Digital
Age.” The Shakespearean World. London: Routledge, 2017: 22-23.
59
Torpey, Peter, Ben Bloomberg, Elena Jessop, and Akito van Troyer. “Remote Theatrical Immersion: Extending
Sleep No More.” http://opera.media.mit.edu/projects/sleep_no_more/
60
Peter Higgin. “Punchdrunk on its Media Lab Collaboration.” Opera of the Future. Accessed April 14
th
, 2017.
https://operaofthefuture.com/
61
Gina Bloom and UCD ModLab. Play the Knave. http://playtheknave.org/
62
Gina Bloom, Sawyer Kemp, Nicholas Toothman, and Evan Bushwell. “’A whole theater of others’: Amateur
Acting and Immersive Spectatorship in the Digital Shakespeare Game Play the Knave.” Shakespeare Quarterly. Vol.
67, No. 4, Winter 2016: 425.
63
Ibid., 430.
64
Gina Bloom. Gaming the Stage: Playable Media and the Rise of English Commercial Theater. University of
Michigan Press, 2018. 4.
65
Ian Bogost. How to Do Things With Videogames. University of Minnesota Press, 2011. 4.

129

66
Rosemary Klich. “Playing a Punchdrunk Game: Immersive Theatre and Videogaming.” James Frieze, ed.
Reframing Immersive Theater. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2017. 223-224.
67
Crawford, John. “To Be or Not to Be—Now in Virtual Reality.” Babson Thought & Action. January 28, 2019.
“(https://entrepreneurship.babson.edu/hamlet-virtual-reality/)

Chapter One

1
Michel Foucault. “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias.” Ed. Leach, Neil. “Rethinking Architecture: A
Reader in Cultural Theory.” Rethinking Architecture: a Reader in Cultural Theory, Routledge, 1997. 329-357;
Victor Turner. “Liminal to Liminoid, in Play, Flow, and Ritual: An Essay in Comparative Symbology.” Rice
Institute Pamphlet - Rice University Studies, 60, no. 3 (1974) Rice University: https://hdl.handle.net/1911/63159.
2
"geotag, n." OED Online, Oxford University Press, June 2022.
3
Michel de Certeau, “Chapter VII, Spatial Practices: Walking in the City.” The Practice of Everyday Life. 93.
4
Jean E Howard. Theater of a City: The Places of London Comedy, 1598-1642. Philadelphia, PA: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2008. 3.
5
Sanders, Julie. “The Cultural Geography of Early Modern Drama, 1620–1650.” The Cultural Geography of Early
Modern Drama, 1620-1650, Cambridge University Press, 2011. 18.
6
Ibid., 7.
7
Susan Bennett. “Space into Place.”The Cambridge guide to the worlds of Shakespeare, Vol I. Ed. Bruce R. Smith.
Cambridge University Press, 2016. 14.
8
Thomas Platter’s Travels In England, 1599. Trans. Clare Williams. 1937. London: Jonathan Cape Ltd. 166-167.
9
R.A. Foakes. “Shakespeare’s Elizabethan Stages.” Shakespeare: An Illustrated Stage History. Eds. Jonathan Bate
and Russell Jackson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996: 21.
10
Karim-Cooper, Farah. “Touch and Taste in Shakespeare’s Theatres.” Eds. Farah Karim-Cooper and Tiffany Stern.
Shakespeare's Theatres and the Effects of Performance. Bloomsbury, 2014. 218.
11
Ibid., 215.
12
Rebecca Lemon. “Player’s Club.” Laphams Quarterly, Winter 2012. 201.
13
Tiffany Stern. “’A Small-Beer Health to His Second Day’: Playwrights, Prologues, and First Performances in the
Early Modern Theater.” Studies in Philology 101, no. 2 (2004): 188.
14
Thomas Platter’s Travels In England, 1599. Trans. Clare Williams. 1937. London: Jonathan Cape Ltd.170
15
Earnshaw, Steven. The Pub in Literature: England’s Altered State. Manchester University Press, 2001. 48.
16
Schechner, Richard. Performance Studies: An Introduction. London: Taylor & Francis Group, 2020. 67.
17
Victor Turner. “Liminal to Liminoid, in Play, Flow, and Ritual: An Essay in Comparative Symbology.” Rice
Institute Pamphlet - Rice University Studies, 60, no. 3 (1974) Rice University: https://hdl.handle.net/1911/63159.
18
Ibid., 84, 86.
19
Ibid., 86.
20
Ibid., 85.
21
Michel Foucault. “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias.” Ed. Leach, Neil. “Rethinking Architecture: A
Reader in Cultural Theory.” Rethinking Architecture: a Reader in Cultural Theory, Routledge, 1997. 334.
22
Ibid., 336.
23
Ibid., 334.
24
Joanna Bucknall. “Liminoid Invitations and Liminoid Acts: The role of ludic strategies and tropes in immersive
and micro-performance dramaturgies.” London: Routledge. Performance Research. 2016: Volume 21 (4), 53.
25
Ibid., 54.
26
Bruce R. Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1999. 275.
27
Douglas Bruster and Robert Weimann. Prologues to Shakespeare’s Theatre Performance and Liminality in Early
Modern Drama. New York: Routledge Press, 2004. 37.
28
Rebecca Lemon. “Player’s Club.” Laphams Quarterly, Winter 2012. 203.
29
Douglas Bruster and Robert Weimann. Prologues to Shakespeare's Theatre: Performance and Liminality of Early
Modern Drama. New York: Routledge Press, 2004: 27
30
Tiffany Stern. “’A Small-Beer Health to His Second Day’: Playwrights, Prologues, and First Performances in the
Early Modern Theater.” Studies in Philology 101, no. 2 (2004): 177.

130

31
Tom Clayton. “’So quick bright things come to confusion’: or, What Else Was A Midsummer Night’s Dream
About?” Shakesepare: Text and Theatre (Essays in Honor of Jay L. Halio). Eds. Lois Potter and Arthur F. Kinney.
Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1999. 71.
32
Bruce R. Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1999. 282.
33
"bush, n.1." OED Online, Oxford University Press, June 2022.
34
Steven Mulaney. The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England. Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1995. 21-22.
35
First noted in John Stow’s 1598 “Survey of London” which was completed by John Strype in 1633.
36
Edward Hatton. A New View of London. 1708. Project Gutenburg.
37
Roy Porter. London: A Social History. Harvard University Press, 1998. 5–6.
38
Allison, Emily. “The Elephant.” The Map of Early Modern London, Edition 7.0, edited by Janelle Jenstad, U of
Victoria. 05 May 2022. mapoflondon.uvic.ca/edition/7.0/ELEP1.htm.
39
Jacqueline Simpson. Green Men & White Swans: The Folklore of British Pub Names. London: Random House
Books, 2010: 92.
40
Shelley, Henry C. Inns and Taverns of Old London, Boston, 1909. Project Gutenburg.
41
Rebecca Lemon. Addiction and Devotion in Early Modern England. University of Pennsylvania Press. 2018. 81.
42
Ibid., 89.
43
Steven Earnshaw. The Pub in Literature: England’s Altered State. Manchester University Press, 2001. 54.
44
Albert H. Tolman. “Shakespeare Studies: Part IV. Drunkenness in Shakespeare.” Modern Language Notes: Vol.
34, No. 2. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1919. 82.
45
Rebecca Lemon. Addiction and Devotion in Early Modern England. University of Pennsylvania Press. 2018. 100.
46
Washington Irving. “The Boar’s Head Tavern, Eastcheap.” 1819. Project Gutenburg.
47
Schechner, Richard. Performance Studies: An Introduction Taylor & Francis Group, 2020. 70.

Chapter Two

1
Thomas Platter’s Travels In England, 1599. Trans. Clare Williams. 1937. London: Jonathan Cape Ltd. 168-169.
2
Ibid.,174.
3
Ibid.,166, 175.
4
Ibid., 167, 170, 174.
5
Jason Scott-Warren,“When Theaters Were Bear-Gardens; Or, What's at Stake in the Comedy of Humors.” 64.
6
Makinder, Anthony, Lyn Blackmore, Julian Bowsher and Christopher Phillpotts. The Hope playhouse, animal
baiting, and later industrial activity at Bear Gardens on Bankside. Archaeology Studies: Series 25. Museum of
London Archeology Press: 2014. 16.
7
Ibid., 17.
8
“Bartholomew Fair.” Shakesepeare’s Globe. Summer 2019. https://www.shakespearesglobe.com/whats-
on/bartholomew-fair-2019/
9
Anne Wohlcke. The Perpetual Fair: Gender, Disorder, and Urban Amusement in eighteenth-century London.
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014. 23.
10
Dianne Payne. “Smithfield's Bartholomew Fair.” Historian 109 (Spring 2011). 12.
11
“History of the Area.” Smithfield Market. https://www.smithfieldmarket.com/
12
Francis Teague. The Curious History of Bartholomew Fair. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. 1985. 18.
13
Roland Barthes. “Semiology and the Urban.” The City and the Sign: An Introduction to Urban Semiotics. Eds. M.
Gottdiener and Alexandros Ph. Lagopoulos. New York: Columbia University Press. 1986. 171.
14
Suzanne Gossett. “Introduction to Bartholomew Fair.” Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000: 2.
15
Francis Teague. The Curious History of Bartholomew Fair. Lewisburg : Bucknell University Press. 1985. 30.
16
Carlson, Marvin. The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan
Press, 2003. 140.
17
Gay McAuley. Space in Performance: Making Meaning in the Theatre, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press,
1999. 47.
18
Gay McAuley, “Place in the Performance Experience” Modern Drama, Volume 46, Number 4, Winter 2003, pp.
598-613 (Article)
19
Ibid. 16-17.
20
Henry Morley, Memoirs of Bartholomew Fair. London: Chapman and Hall, 1859. 149.

131

21
Harrison, Tom. “Taking Liberties: The Influence of the Architectural and Ideological Space of the Hope Theatre
on Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair.” The Ben Jonson Journal, 24(1), 2017. 76.
22
Ibid., 91.
23
Bettina Boecker, Imagining Shakespeare’s Original Audience 1660-2000: Groundlings, Gallants, Grocers
London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. 42.
24
Ben Jonson. Timber; or Discoveries Made Upon Men and Matter. Ed. Henry Morley. Cassell & Company, LTD:
London, Paris and Melbourne.1892. Project Gutenburg EBook. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/5134/5134-h/5134-
h.htm
25
Peter Stallybrass and Allon White. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University
Press, 1986. 62.
26
Johan Huizinga. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1944. 1.
27
Ibid., 8.
28
Peter Stallybrass and Allon White. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University
Press, 1986. 62.
29
Mikhail Bakhtin. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Helene Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1984. 10.
30
Ibid., 72.
31
Steven Mulaney, The Place of the Stage: License, Play and Power in Renaissance England. Ann Arbor, MI:
Univeristy of Michigan Press, 1995. 21-22.
32
Roland Barthes. “Semiology and the Urban.” The City and the Sign: An Introduction to Urban Semiotics. Eds. M.
Gottdiener and Alexandros Ph. Lagopoulos. New York: Columbia University Press. 1986. 171.
33
Ibid 171.
34
Makinder, Anthony, Lyn Blackmore, Julian Bowsher and Christopher Phillpotts. The Hope playhouse, animal
baiting, and later industrial activity at Bear Gardens on Bankside. Archaeology Studies: Series 25. Museum of
London Archeology Press: 2014. 16.
35
Ibid 17.
36
Ibid 19.
37
Ibid 20.
38
Blankenship. “What’s Smell Got to Do With It?” American Theatre Group. February 24, 2016.
https://www.americantheatre.org/2016/02/24/aroma-turgy-whats-smell-got-to-do-with-it/
39
Stephen di Benedetto. “Scenography and the Senses: Engaging the tactile, olfactory, and gustatory senses.” The
Routledge Companion to Scenography. Ed. Arnold Aronson. Abingdon, Oxfordshire: Routledge Press, 2017. 72.
40
Stephen di Benedetto. “Scenography and the Senses: Engaging the tactile, olfactory, and gustatory senses.” The
Routledge Companion to Scenography. Ed. Arnold Aronson. Abingdon, Oxfordshire: Routledge Press, 2017. 72.
41
Alexandra Logue. “‘Saucy Stink’: Smells, Sanitation, and Conflict in Early Modern London.” Renaissance and
Reformation, vol. 44, no. 2, 2021. 61.
42
Henry Morley, Memoirs of Bartholomew Fair. London: Chapman and Hall, 1859. 145.
43
Dianne Payne. “Smithfield's Bartholomew Fair.” Historian 109 (Spring 2011). 12.
44
Bruce R. Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1999. 55.
45
Thomas Platter’s Travels In England, 1599. Trans. Clare Williams. 1937. London: Jonathan Cape Ltd. 169-170.
46
Bruce R. Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1999. 62.
47
Dugan, Holly. "‘As Dirty as Smithfield and as Stinking Every Whit’: The Smell of the Hope Theatre." The Arden
Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare’s Theatres and the Effects of Performance. Ed. Farah Karim-Cooper and Tiffany
Stern. London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2014. 205.
48
Ibid 206.
49
Sanders, Julie. The Cultural Geography of Early Modern Drama, 1620-1650, Cambridge University Press, 2011.
18, 21.
50
Dianne Payne. “Smithfield's Bartholomew Fair.” Historian 109 (Spring 2011). 13.
51
Anne Wohlcke. The Perpetual Fair: Gender, Disorder, and Urban Amusement in eighteenth-century London.
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014. 36.
52
Peter Stallybrass and Allon White. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University
Press, 1986. 62.
53
Ibid., 44.

132

54
“carnival." OED Online, Oxford University Press, July 2018.
55
Peter Stallybrass and Allon White. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University
Press, 1986. 44.
56
Ibid., 63.
57
Richard Cavendish. “London’s Last Bartholomew Fair.” History Today Volume 55 Issue 9 September 2005.
https://www.historytoday.com/archive/london%E2%80%99s-last-bartholomew-fair
58
Peter Lake and Michael C. Questier. The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists and Players in Post-
Reformation England. Yale University Press, 2002. 592.
59
Peter Stallybrass and Allon White. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University
Press, 1986. 65.
60
Ibid., 64-65.
61
Dugan, Holly. "‘As Dirty as Smithfield and as Stinking Every Whit’: The Smell of the Hope Theatre." The Arden
Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare’s Theatres and the Effects of Performance. Ed. Farah Karim-Cooper and Tiffany
Stern. London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2014. 203.
62
Anne Wohlcke. The Perpetual Fair: Gender, Disorder, and Urban Amusement in eighteenth-century London.
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014.

Chapter Three

1
Grossman, Julie. Literature, Film, and Their Hideous Progeny: Adaptation and ElasTEXTity. London: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2015. 152.
2
Coriolan/Us. National Theatre of Wales. August 2012. https://www.nationaltheatrewales.org/ntw_shows/coriolan-
us/#about_the_show
3
Worthen, W.B. 2012. ‘The written troubles of the brain’: Sleep No More and the space of character. Theatre
Journal 64 (1): 85.
4
Kathryn Prince. “Intimate and Epic Macbeths in Contemporary Performance.” The Oxford Handbook of
Shakespeare and Performance. Ed. James C Bulman. Oxford University Press. Nov 2017. 252.
5
Lauren Ludwig. Hamlet-Mobile. In The Best Plays from American Theatre Festivals 2015. Edited by John Patrick
Bray. Milwaukee, IL: Applause and Cinema Books, 2016: 377.
6
Christian M. Billing. “Shakespeare Performed: The Roman Tragedies." Shakespeare Quarterly 61.3 (2010): 416..
7
Susan Bennett and Sonia Massai, eds. Ivo Van Hove : From Shakespeare to David Bowie. Meuthen Drama
Publishing, London. 2018. 59.
8
Coriolan/US program. National Theatre of Wales. August 2012.
https://www.nationaltheatrewales.org/ntw_shows/coriolan-us/#programme
9
Thomas Cartelli, “High-Tech Shakesepare in a Mediatized Globe: Ivo van Hove’s and the Problem of
Spectatorship.” The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Performance. Ed. James C Bulman. Oxford University
Press. Nov 2017. 268.
10
Pascale Aebischer, Shakespeare, Spectatorship and the Technologies of Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2020. 23.
11
Thomas Cartelli, “High-Tech Shakesepare in a Mediatized Globe: Ivo van Hove’s and the Problem of
Spectatorship.” The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Performance. Ed. James C Bulman. Oxford University
Press. Nov 2017. 272.
12
Coriolan/Us. National Theatre of Wales. August 2012.
https://www.nationaltheatrewales.org/ntw_shows/coriolan-us/#about_the_show
13
Andrew Filmer, “Coriolan/us and the Limits of ‘Immersive’”James Frieze, ed. Reframing Immersive Theater.
London: Palgrave Macmillan UK. 2017. 207.
14
Harry Fox Davies. “Play Review: Coriolan/Us.” Cahiers Élisabéthains: A Journal of English Renaissance
Studies, 83(1): 36.
15
Coriolan/US program. National Theatre of Wales. August 2012.
https://www.nationaltheatrewales.org/ntw_shows/coriolan-us/#programme
16
Hamlet-Mobile. Indiegogo Fundraising Campaign: production details.
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/hamlet-mobile#/
17
Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1944. 10.
18
Gary Izzo, The Art of Play: the New Genre of Interactive Theater. Portsmouth, NH: Heineman Drama. 1997. 9.
19
Gay McAuley, “Place in the Performance Experience.” Modern Drama. Vol 46, No 4. Winter 2003. 599.

133

20
Lauren Ludwig. Hamlet-Mobile. In The Best Plays from American Theatre Festivals 2015. Edited by John Patrick
Bray. Milwaukee, IL: Applause and Cinema Books, 2016: 400.
21
Lauren Ludwig. Hamlet-Mobile. In The Best Plays from American Theatre Festivals 2015. Edited by John Patrick
Bray. Milwaukee, IL: Applause and Cinema Books, 2016: 377.
22
Punchdrunk. https://www.punchdrunk.com/sleep-no-more/
23
Joesphine Machon. Immersive Theatres: intimacy and immediacy in contemporary performance. London:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. 80.
24
Brett Greatley-Hirsch and Michael Best. “‘Within this Wooden [2.]O’: Shakespeare and New Media in the Digital
Age.” The Shakespearean World. London: Routledge, 2017: 22-23.
25
Henry Jenkins. “Game Design as narrative Architecture.” 2002.
http://web.mit.edu/~21fms/People/henry3/games&narrative.html
26
Murray, Janet Horowitz. Hamlet on the Holodeck: the Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. New York: Free Press,
1997. 2
nd
ed, 2016. 75.
27
Murray, Janet Horowitz. Hamlet on the Holodeck: the Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. New York: Free Press,
1997. 2
nd
ed, 2016. 75.
28
Sleep No More. Program. “Interview with Felix Barret and Maxine Doyle.” 21-29.
29
Peter Stallybrass andAllon White. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University
Press, 1986. 62.
30
Adam Alston. “Theatre Through the Fireplace: Punchdrunk and the Neoliberal Ethos.” Beyond Immersive
Theater. Ed. Adam Alston. Palgrave Macmillan. Page 109-144. 126.
31
Thomas, Cartelli.“Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More: Masks, unmaskings, one-on-ones.” Borrowers and Lenders: The
Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation. 2012–2013. VII: 2.
32
Joanna Bucknall. “Liminoid Invitations and Liminoid Acts: The role of ludic strategies and tropes in immersive
and micro-performance dramaturgies.” London: Routledge. Performance Research, 2016-07-03, Vol.21 (4). 55.
33
JD Oxblood. 2012-2013. “Crossing the Line: Liminality and Lies in Sleep No More.” Borrowers and Lenders:
The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation VI: 5.
34
O’Leary, Deridre. 2013. Ghosted dramaturgy: Mapping the haunted space in Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More. The
Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies 12: 72-73.
35
Worthen, W.B. ‘The written troubles of the brain’: Sleep No More and the space of character.” Theatre Journal
64 (1), 2012. 85.
36
Grossman, Julie. Literature, Film, and Their Hideous Progeny: Adaptation and ElasTEXTity. London: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2015. 149.
37
Alexa Alice Joubin. “Global Shakespeare Criticism Beyond the Nation State.” Ed. James C Bulman. The Oxford
Handbook of Shakespeare and Performance. Oxford University Press. Nov 2017. 426-427.
38
Chun, Tarryn Li-Min. 2019. Mediated transgression and Madame white: Technology and the nonhuman in
contemporary stagings of a Chinese folktale. Theatre Journal 71 (3): 308.
39
Joubin, Alexa Alice. 2009. Chinese Shakespeares: Two centuries of cultural exchange. New York: Columbia
University Press. 80.
40
McHugh, Caitlin. 2017. ‘Thou Hast It Now’: One-on-Ones and the Online Community of Punchdrunk’s SNM. In
Shakespeare/Not Shakespeare, ed. Christy Desmet, Natalie Loper, and Jim Casey. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. 173.
41
http://drinkthehalo.tumblr.com/, http://bloodwillhavebloodtheysay.tumblr.com/, http://remembertheporter-
blog.tumblr.com/, https://theconfessionofawhitemask.tumblr.com/archive
42
Laura Leslie. “Drink the Halo.” November 6, 2017. http://drinkthehalo.tumblr.com/post/167218286833/sleep-no-
more-shanghai-final-thoughts
43
Pascale Aeibischer, Shakespeare, Spectatorship and the Technologies of Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2020. 22.

Chapter Four

1
Royal Shakespeare Company. “Watch Dream on Demand.” 2021. https://www.rsc.org.uk/news/dream-on-demand
2
Dalya Alberge. “Is this an avatar I see before me? Audience takes to stage in virtual Shakespeare play.” The
Guardian. 7 February 2021. https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2021/feb/07/is- this-an-avatar-i-see-before-me-
audience-takes-to-stage-in-virtual-shakespeare-play
3
Friedman, Ken and Lily Diaz. “Intermedia, Multimedia and Media.” Adaptation and Convergence of Media:
‘High’ Culture Intermediality Versus Popular Culture Intermediality. Edited by Lily Diaz, Magda Dragu and Lena
Eilittä. Aalto ARTS Books, 2018. 28-30.

134

4
Greenblatt, Stephen. “The Interart Moment.” Interart Poetics: Essays on the Interrelations of the
Arts and Media. Eds. Ulla Britta Lagerroth, Hans Lund, and Erik Iedling. Amsterdam: Rodopoi Editions BV,
1997. 14.
5
Higgins, Dick. “Some Poetry Intermedia.” Intermedia, Fluxus and the Something Else Press: Selected Writings by
Dick Higgins. Edited by Steve Clay and Ken Friedman. Siglio Press, 2018. 241.
6
Julia Meier. “Genuine Thought is Inter(medial).” Travels in Intermedia[lity]: Reblurring the Boundaries. Ed.
Bernd Herzogenrath. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2012. 134
7
“Hamlet (Gielgud, 1964).” Global Shakespeares Video and Performance Archive. Accessed April 1, 2022.
https://globalshakespeares.mit.edu/hamlet-gielgud-john-
1964/#:~:text=Richard%20Burton's%20Hamlet%20is%20a,at%20the%20Lunt%2DFontanne%20Theatre.
8
WB Worthen. “Shakespearean Technicity” The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Performance. Ed. James C
Bulman. Oxford University Press, 2017. 334.
9
Annie Dorsen. A Piece of Work. Annie Dorsen Projects. Accessed April 13
th
, 2017.
http://anniedorsen.com/showproject.php?id=14
10
La Rocco, Claudia. “To Thine Own Algorithm Be True.” The New York Times. December 15, 2013.
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/16/theater/annie-dorsens-a-piece-of-work-at-bam.html
11
Rebecca Bushnell, “Videogames and Hamlet: Experiencing Tragic Choice and Consequences.” Eds. Tom Bishop,
Gina Bloom, and Erika Lin. Games and Theatre in Shakespeare’s England. Amsterdam University Press, 2021. 236.
12
Murray, Janet Horowitz. Hamlet on the Holodeck: the Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. New York: Free Press,
1997. 2
nd
ed, 2016. 125.
13
Bogaev, Barbara. “Hamlet 360: Virtual Reality Shakespeare.” Interview with Steve Maler and Matthew
Niederhauser. “Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 119.” Folger Shakespeare Library. April 16, 2019.
https://www.folger.edu/shakespeare-unlimited/hamlet-virtual-reality
14
Ibid.
15
Ibid.
16
Schechner, Richard. Performance Theory. London: Routledge Press, 2003. 67
17
Crawford, John. “To Be or Not to Be—Now in Virtual Reality.” Babson Thought & Action. January 28, 2019.
“(https://entrepreneurship.babson.edu/hamlet-virtual-reality/)
18
Barbara Fuchs Theater of Lockdown Digital and Distanced Performance in a Time of Pandemic. Meuthen Drama
2021. 6, 11.
19
Pascale Aebischer. Viral Shakespeare: Performance in the Time of Pandemic. 2021. Section 2.1.1.
20
Royal Shakespeare Company. “In Conversation with Pippa Hill and Robin McNicholas.” 2021.
https://www.rsc.org.uk/support/supporters-room/get-closer/in-conversation-with-pippa-hill-and-robin-mcnicholas
21
Stephen Greenblatt. “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” The Norton Shakespeare, 2
nd
Ed. New York: 2008. 840-841.
22
“Building (the) Dream.” YouTube. November 8, 2021. Accessed March 1, 2022.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVSMpUBRMVg
23
Royal Shakespeare Company. “Live Performance and Gaming Technology Come Together to Explore the Future
for Audiences and Live Theatre.” 2021. https://www.rsc.org.uk/press/releases/live-performance-and-gaming-
technology-come-together-to-explore-the-future-for-audiences-and-live-theatre
24
Royal Shakespeare Company. The Tempest. https://www.rsc.org.uk/the-tempest/gregory-doran-2016-production.
For further reading about digital affordances in RSC’s 2016 Tempest, see Pascale Aebischer’s chapter, “‘Tech-
Enabled’ Theatre at the RSC: Digital Performance and Gregory Doran’s Tempest (RSC, 2016)” in her book,
Shakespeare, Spectatorship and the Technologies of Performance (Cambridge University Press, 2020).
25
“The Last Syllable.” Independent Shakespeare Company of Los Angeles.
https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/5c75013899734c4e9f56a3df6a8f4a74
26
“The Last Syllable.” Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab.
https://blackphoenixalchemylab.com/shop/collaborations/independent-shakespeare-company/the-last-syllable/tis-
strange-perfume-oil/
27
Royal Shakespeare Company. “Live Performance and Gaming Technology Come Together to Explore the Future
for Audiences and Live Theatre.” 2021. https://www.rsc.org.uk/press/releases/live-performance-and-gaming-
technology-come-together-to-explore-the-future-for-audiences-and-live-theatre
28
Royal Shakespeare Company. “Live Performance and Gaming Technology Come Together to Explore the Future
for Audiences and Live Theatre.” 2021. https://www.rsc.org.uk/press/releases/live-performance-and-gaming-
technology-come-together-to-explore-the-future-for-audiences-and-live-theatre
29
Alexis Soloski. “Living the ‘Dream,’ on Your Laptop or Phone.” 17 March 2021.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/17/theater/review-dream-royal-shakespeare-company.html.

135

30
Nick Wayne. “Dream, Inspired by A Midsummer Night's Dream, by the Royal Shakespeare Company.” 17 March
2021. http://www.pocketsizetheatre.com/2021/03/review-dream-inspired- by-midsummer
31
“Building (the) Dream.” YouTube. November 8, 2021. Accessed March 1, 2022.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVSMpUBRMVg
32
Ibid.
33
Milk, Chris. “How Virtual Reality Can Create the Ultimate Empathy Machine.” Ted Talk. 2015.
https://www.ted.com/talks/chris_milk_how_virtual_reality_can_create_the_ultimate_empathy_machine?language=e
n
34
Murray, Janet Horowitz. Hamlet on the Holodeck: the Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. New York: Free Press,
1997. 2
nd
ed, 2016. 362.

Epilogue

1
Song names identified by the following bloggers: Paisley Sweets and Behind a White Mask
(https://paisleysweets.tumblr.com/post/41572547344/all-there-is-the-music-of-the-mckittrick-hotel and
https://behindawhitemask.tumblr.com/post/26345228760/kathrynyu-sleep-no-more-soundtrack).
2
Bruce R. Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1999. 158.

136

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Abstract (if available)

Abstract Immersive Shakespeare examines the ways in which contemporary Shakespearean adaptations use immersive tactics to spur a sea-change. Namely, how do immersive strategies and technologies adapt the way contemporary audiences experience and respond to centuries-old narratives? Bedrock to this research is the understanding that immersive strategies such as audience interaction, site-specificity, and polysensorial experiences were not invented during the recent surge of immersive plays and experiences, but rather that these strategies were likewise integral to early modern performance. Immersive Shakespeare contributes to existing Shakespearean and immersive theater research by including liminal and ludic phenomena as two additional facets of immersive storytelling. While both liminal thresholds and ludic play are present in all performance, in immersive experiences these qualities are amplified due to the physical experience of being immersed. Since audience members are invited inside the narrative, the threshold between reality and fiction is experienced by and processed in the body which not only creates space for heightened interaction with the story but also allows audiences to establish a personal stake in the narrative. In other words, how do liminal, ludic and immersive properties enable audiences, early modern and contemporary alike, to play with Shakespeare?

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University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

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Asset Metadata

Creator Sullivan, Anne Elizabeth "Betsy" (filename)

Core Title Immersive Shakespeare: locating early modern immersion in contemporary adaptations

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Degree Conferral Date 2022-12

Publication Date 11/03/2022

Defense Date 10/04/2022

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag audience interaction,digital immersion,early modern immersion,immersive theater,liminal,ludic,multi-sensory experience,OAI-PMH Harvest,poly-sensorial experience,Shakespeare,Shakespearean adaptations,site specificity

Format theses (aat)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Gambrell, Alice (committee chair), Smith , Bruce (committee chair), Mancall, Peter (committee member)

Creator Email annesull@usc.edu,betsysullivanwrite@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-oUC112305186

Unique identifier UC112305186

Identifier etd-SullivanAn-11299.pdf (filename)

Legacy Identifier etd-SullivanAn-11299

Document Type Dissertation

Format theses (aat)

Rights Sullivan, Anne Elizabeth "Betsy"

Internet Media Type application/pdf

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Source 20221107-usctheses-batch-990 (batch), University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

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