The Shakespeare-VR Project

Virtual Reality in Humanities Education

Book: Shakespeare and Virtual Reality

Shakespeare and Virtual Reality (Cambridge UP, 2021) is a collection of scholarly essays edited by Stephen Wittek and David McInnis. Bringing together contributions from scholars, educators, and media artists, the volume explores how virtual reality can transform the teaching, performance, and experience of Shakespeare’s works. Collectively, the essays in the volume position VR not just as a tool for presenting Shakespeare, but as a medium that can itself be enriched by Shakespearean forms of meaning-making.

  • See here for further details.
  • Click here to read Dr. Stephen Wittek’s essay for the volume, “Spaces in Headsets and Heads Set in Spaces: Notes on the Shakespeare-VR Project.”

CONTENTS:

  • Introduction
    • Stephen Wittek (Asssociate Professor, Carnegie Mellon University)
    • David McInnis (Associate Professor, University of Melbourne)
      • The editors introduce the collection by framing VR as uniquely suited to Shakespeare’s participatory and theatrical qualities. They outline the book’s goals: exploring how VR can enhance Shakespearean pedagogy, performance, and scholarship while also examining what Shakespeare offers to the development of immersive media.
  • PART I WHY SHAKESPEARE AND VIRTUAL REALITY?
  • Chapter 1 – What Can Shakespeare Do for Virtual Reality?
    • Jennifer Roberts-Smith (Associater Professor, University of Waterloo)
      • Why Shakespeare and Virtual Reality? For Jennifer Roberts-Smith, the pathway to substantive engagement begins by asking what Shakespeare can do for VR, rather than the other way around. Her chapter begins the volume by offering a clear-eyed account of what virtual experience is and is not, followed by suggestions for how to make virtual reality more Shakespearean.
  • Chapter 2 – ‘As We Are [Hacked] with Art’: The Shakespearean Imagination in the Virtual Age
    • Scott Hollifield (Associater Professor, University of Nevada Las Vegas)
      • Scott Hollifield expands on Roberts-Smith’s argument by pointing toward affinities between virtual reality and Shakespeare’s dramatic technique, and by considering how virtual reality fits into the history of Shakespeare on film.
  • PART II EDUCATION
  • Chapter 3 – Virtual Reality in the Classroom
    • David McInnis (Associate Professor, University of Melbourne)
      • David McInnis’ chapter describes how immersive technologies like 360-degree video and virtual reality can be used to enhance Shakespeare pedagogy by placing students in the middle of performance spaces, encouraging interpretive engagement, embodied learning, and active spectator participation.
  • Chapter 4 – Imagination Bodies Forth: Augmenting Shakespeare with Undergraduates
    • Emily Bryan (Assistant Professor, Sacred Heart University)
      • Emily Bryan’s chapter describes how augmented reality tools such as the Thyng app can be used to foster “augmented annotation” in undergraduate Shakespeare courses, encouraging students to engage critically and creatively with early modern texts through multimodal, performance-inflected reading practices.
  • Chapter 5 – Real Presence in the Virtual Classroom
    • Erin Sullivan (Reader in Shakespeare, Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham)
      • Erin Sullivan’s chapter on pedagogical theory assesses the biases inherent in concepts of the virtual, and considers how such biases impact classroom dynamics.
  • PART III CURRENT PROJECTS AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS
  • Chapter 6 – Infinite Space: Notes towards Shakespeare’s Virtual Reality Future
    • Michael Ullyot (Associate Professor, University of Calgary)
      • Michael Ullyot’s chapter offers a critical overview of some of the most notable VR adaptations of Shakespeare from the past few years.
  • Chapter 7 – ‘Death or Punishment by the Hands of Others’: Presence, Absence, and Virtual Reality in Red Bull Theater’s The White Devil (2019)
    • Jennifer A. Low (Professor Emerita, Florida Atlantic University)
      • Jennifer A. Low anlyzes a production of The White Devil that used VR headsets as props, thereby putting Jacobean revenge tragedy in dialogue with present day discourse around the virtual.
  • Chapter 8 – Spaces in Headsets and Heads Set in Spaces: Notes on the Shakespeare-VR Project
    • Stephen Wittek (Asssociate Professor, Carnegie Mellon University)
      • Stephen Wittek shares a candid account of Shakespeare-VR, tracing the project’s course of development from inception to planning, filming, dissemination, and classroom testing.
  • Annotated Bibliography
    • Justin Carpenter (Independent Scholar)
      • Justin Carpenter provides a list of scholarly work on virtual reality, complete with short summaries of each entry.