Is this a smiley face which I see before me — or is #ShakespeareMe a whole new way to discover the Bard?
What would Shakespeare have made of social media? In particular, would our greatest writer have been a fan of emojis? Discuss.
Predictably, perhaps, some critics have already had their say about the ShakespeareMe interactive feature, launched today on the experimental BBC Taster site as part of the much wider BBC Shakespeare Festival.
It invites users to choose emojis to reflect their mood and get a selection of shareable Shakespeare quotes to match. They’ll get lots of online leads to find out more, including on the meaning and context of favourite lines, and links to other BBC Shakespeare content.
When I spoke to the project’s exec producer Dan Gooding ahead of launch, he was optimistic that the mix of social media, personalisation and universal Shakespearean themes would appeal to the target audience of 16–35 year old digital natives (smiley face with sunglasses: “Pleasure and action make the hours seem short” — Othello).
And far from accepting claims by some press commentators of “dumbing down” — or as the Telegraph’s theatre critic Dominic Cavendish had it, risking turning off the audience with a shortage of plays and a “glut of froth” — Gooding was adamant that ShakespeareMe will have the opposite effect on a group whose abiding memories of Shakespeare at school may have been of “complex, impenetrable language”.
“It’s actually the reverse — we’re opening up this wonderful world of Shakespeare to a digital audience, and helping them to see the works as relevant and personal to them. Our target users are more likely to engage from their devices than go to see a play, but the idea is that they’ll discover that this is quite exciting, so want to share and take their interest further,” Gooding said. Playful, yes, but with serious intent.
Salford-based BBC Learning worked with Manchester digital agency magneticNorth to develop ShakespeareMe, one of a number of interactive online elements in the month-long BBC Shakespeare season, including on the BBC iWonder site. The brief came from creative director Helen Foulkes after some “collaborative” ideas bashing and documentary-maker Gooding came on board later.
A specially designed set of 21 emojis can be paired with the most appropriate of almost 270 quotes from 36 plays and two sonnets, hand-picked by Shakespeare Birthplace Trust lecturer Dr Anjna Chouhan. She was “delighted” to be helping the smartphone generation “engage with his language on their own terms”, she said.
Algorithms generate mood-matching photographs, displayed in split-screen, to help users choose the perfect lines. They can then hit ‘share’ to publish their discoveries, in words and pictures, to Facebook and Twitter or download to Instagram.
The key is personalisation: “Emojis are huge [for this audience]. We’re using them to draw people in so they can make Shakespeare their own,” said Gooding, who series produced BBC One’s Call the Council, worked on Extraordinary People for Channel 5 and is exec producer for the BBC Radio 1 Academy.
He saw no mismatch in the marriage of emojis and the Bard (wide-eyed face: “Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t” — Hamlet).
“Shakespeare pushed boundaries of language all the time and now we’re using a new global language to express emotions. In the way Shakespeare connected to a mass audience and was fond of mixing old and new…what we’re doing is a logical progression for me.”
Despite the doubters (worried face: “What if this mixture do not work at all?” — Romeo and Juliet), the bigger BBC season, marking 400 years since Shakespeare’s death, certainly includes a mix of meaty, traditional offerings.
There’ll be three more episodes of the acclaimed history plays cycle The Hollow Crown, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Judi Dench on BBC Two; a new Midsummer Night’s Dream adaptation by Russell T Davies for BBC One; a collaboration with The Royal Shakespeare Company to host a celebration of Shakespeare’s work and legacy, live from Stratford on the anniversary (23 April); and a whole weekend of Sounds of Shakespeare Live on Radio 3.
More all-out efforts to bring a new, younger audience to the canon include the children’s online quiz What type of actor are you?, inviting budding players to film themselves in Shakespearean role and upload the results to the BBC website, and How to be Epic @ Shakespeare — pretty much what it says on the tin, complete with tips on how to rap, act, sound and dress like Shakespeare.
Continuing in fanciful vein, I asked Dan Gooding whether he thought the great man himself would have embraced social networks: “As a wordsmith I think he’d have loved social media, had huge fun with 140 characters and used Facebook and Instagram to talk to the Marlowes and Middletons of the age. Shakespeare’s been called a ‘magnet for the zeitgeist of the nation’. You go to Facebook and Twitter to get that these days.”
The ShakespeareMe experience has been user-tested internally by its nine celebrity, social media-savvy ‘ambassadors’, including BBC Radio 1’s Greg James, BBC Breakfast’s Dan Walker, EastEnders’ actors Harry Reid and Lorna Fitzgerald, with promising results, Gooding reported: “We’ve all been playing it and it’s quite addictive. I’m very proud of what the team has put together.”
So does the ShakespeareMe company have its own signature emoji and accompanying lines? They’d be from As You Like it, the exec producer said, with little prompting: “Live a little, comfort a little, cheer thyself a little.” And a blissful, smiley face.
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Originally published at www.bbc.co.uk on April 11, 2016.
