“Perform what you command”: Fan Ethnodramaturgy and YouTube Shakespeares
by Valerie M. Fazel
Valentine’s Day marks YouTube’s 15th anniversary, a fitting coincidence when we reflect on how rapidly the website wooed a global audience. Tantalized by YouTube’s “near-universal access” and social media affordances, users rapidly embraced their “transition from relatively passive consumers to fully active producers.” As critical works by Stephen O’Neill, Christy Desmet, and Luke McKernan attest, users uploaded and viewed a remarkable range of fanwork videos between 2005 and 2009, an era we might think of as YouTube Shakespeare’s first wave.
First wave YouTube Shakespeares evoke Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Black Swan metaphor as phenomena that appeared suddenly and unexpectedly, and have generated lasting change in the ways many people access Shakespeare. In the years following the website’s emergence, and while Shakespeare appropriation scholars speculated on YouTube’s place in the archive, countless first wave YouTube Shakespeares receded beyond our purview.
“Alas, alas,” by the early twenty-teens, many first-wave creations came and went under the pressure and confusion of copyright infringement lawsuits, YouTube’s push for advertisement and streaming profits, or simply through the fickle way user attention gravitates to new interests and new online platforms. The reality is that many first wave YouTube Shakespeares did not “survive into the next digital generation,” a new YouTube era most notable for the upsurge of corporate channels, professional content management, and neoliberal celebrity vloggers.
As an enthusiastic fan of first wave Shakespeare video mashups, I periodically check the status of several personal favorites. I am always more than a little crushed when I discover yet another video has disappeared into the ether, and am unabashedly delighted to still find YouTube Shakespeares that have weathered obsolescence.
Machinamom’s 2006 upload “Macbeth Music Video: Muse–Assassin” (“Macbeth — Assassin”) is one for which I profess a longtime fondness. A rambunctious mashup of Macbeth, Blizzard’s 2002 strategy video game Warcraft III, and alt-rock band Muse’s song “Assassin,” the video evinces the pathos that drove early-era “self-referential instances of Shakespearean intertextuality and…the gadgeteering ethos and DIY culture.” The mise-en-scene of the mashup’s narrative frames — for instance, the heath, the castle, Duncan’s bedchamber, and the dining hall — are utterly Warcraft in design, yet they reflect the play’s scenes and situate the viewer in the play’s visual world. Likewise, Macbeth’s characters are embodied by Warcraft avatars, but their “spoken” lines — direct quotes from Shakespeare’s play — appear in a text box below the performance frame. Muse’s “Assassin” also serves as a performer, its music and lyrics ushering the mashup from its eerie opening to its dramatic end.
The video invokes two strikingly compatible theoretical approaches: Jen Gunnels’ and Carrie J. Cole’s concept of the fan as ethnodramaturg, who in their creations “carve out discrete objects of the fictive world [and] link them together in a performative story line” and Christy Desmet’s tiny ontology. Desmet’s theory suggests “both persons and texts are units or objects imbricated in a system, or even a tangle, of relationships that make up digital Shakespeare’s systems of meaning.” An articulation of both these theories, “Macbeth — Assassin” is a fan reconstruct of textual fragments mined from diverse media forms. Machinamom artfully crafts their interpretation of Shakespeare’s play of usurpation, murder, and magic by mashing disparate units together to orchestrate a YouTube video performance of one of Shakespeare’s best-known plays, demonstrating the “core competencies” of fan video production:
[K]nowledge of primary source materials; close attention to their contextual nuances and the opportunities to revise those contexts to make new meanings; analysis of the original and the newly created work; and an attention to how that new work will circulate in and across multiple subcultures…and audiences.
As the video’s ethnodramaturg, Machinamom examined their source texts, choosing the most salient aspects and lines to include from Shakespeare’s play. Furthermore, they selected Warcraft III as the performance’s visual space and Muse’s music as the narrative’s soundtrack and dialog. In other words, they fragmented disparate texts into units, and deployed them into a new system of narrative meaning.
Machinamom followed the trajectory established in Shakespeare’s play, beginning with the three witches and ending with Macduff’s famous lines, “Hail the King of Scotland” (5.8.59). In “Macbeth — Assassin” the witches appear in the opening mise-en-scene of a rain-drenched heath (see image below). As each witch speaks in turn, her headshot appears in a thumbnail while her avatar is encircled by a white, halo-like circle:
First Witch: Where the place?
Second Witch: Upon the heath.
Third Witch: There to meet with Macbeth.
First Witch: I come, Graymalkin.
All: Paddock calls. — Anon.
Fair is foul and foul is fair,
Hover through the fog and filthy air. (1.1.6–11)
Machinamom does not revise the play’s narrative arc, but manipulates the game space’s affordances to accommodate what its interface cannot: the spoken language of the play. Select lines appear as text below the performance space, and voices are substituted with an auditory act of a different kind: Muse’s “Assassin.” Machinamom aligns their characters’ actions with the music and lyrics of Muse’s song, strategically matching visual and auricular features to amplify the breakneck frenzy of their interpretation of the play.
For instance, when Macbeth arrives at the video’s 32-second mark, the thrashing sounds of the guitar, bass, and drums mark this as a turbulent, take-note scene accompanying Macbeth’s dialogue with the witches in their first encounter:
Macbeth: Speak, if you can. What are you?
First Witch: All hail, Macbeth! Hail to thee, Thane of Glamis.
Second Witch: All hail, Macbeth! Hail to thee, Thane of Cawdor.
Third Witch: All hail, Macbeth! That shalt be king hereafter! (1.3.46–48)
At the onset, Macbeth is not only challenged by what he sees, but he is also perplexed by what he hears. While in Shakespeare’s play Macbeth muses over these words, in the video he is all action. Machinamom cannot afford to let him ponder over this prophecy for too long. He has a song to catch.
At the 46 second-mark, the lyrics of “Assassin’s” first verse begin:
The synchronization of music to images to narrative pace is impeccable. It is here we are made aware through sight and sound that Macbeth’s reportedly valorous and honorable character is weakened by his greed and desire for power. “Assassin’s” first verse is accompanied by a visual sequence that provides viewers “additional interpretive guidance,” moving in rapid fire through four different scenes: Ross declaring to Macbeth “He bade me, from him, call thee Thane of Cawdor” (1.3.103); Lady Macbeth delivering the lines “Look like the innocent flower/But be the serpent under ’t” (1.5.63); Duncan approaching the castle and declaring “This castle hath a pleasant seat!” (1.6.1); and finally, Macbeth’s questioning “Is this a dagger which I see before me?” (2.1.33). “Assassin’s” fevered pitch and the quick succession of moving images reveals that the “vaulting ambition” (1.7.27) of Shakespeare’s Macbeth is also his downfall as he slips from hero to assassin, from soldier to usurper. In “Macbeth — Assassin,” Macbeth becomes the titular “Assassin.”
Machinamom’s four-and-half minute video evinces their critical awareness of key narrative scenes and lines from Shakespeare’s Macbeth and how they best fit Warcraft’s interface, no inconsequential task even with the shortest of Shakespeare’s tragedies. Both Shakespeare’s language and Warcraft III’s images must be synchronized with Muse’s “Assassin” as it is the only text Machinamom does not alter or edit. As dramaturg, Machinamom provides a “coherence” to the mashup, a narrative flow dependent on the precise articulation of text, image, and song. “Assassin” places additional narrative emphasis on the play’s violent scenes and Macbeth’s regrettable choices.
Because the video’s various source materials “can’t get much farther apart,” mashing disparate units together requires an astute familiarity with all three texts. Machinamom created an intertextual, transmedial narrative interpretation of Macbeth stemming from their diligence and desire to create works that “speak to the special interests of the fan community” comprised, in this case, of Warcraft III, Muse, and/or Shakespeare fans.
Machinamom’s “Macbeth — Assassin” is dedicated to the craft of mashing Macbeth into a new “system” of meaning, a retelling of the play offering a glimpse not only into Shakespeare’s affective cultural afterlives, but also fans’ affective and intellectual investment. Mashed together, Gunnels’ and Cole’s claims for the fan as ethnodramaturg and Desmet’s tiny ontology effectively theorize YouTube Shakespeares as a “system” formulated by human and non-human units that call into play new Shakespearean meanings. Such interdisciplinary approaches recognize marginalized online Shakespearean use and advance the distinctively original, affective, diverse voices that activate new Shakespeares.
It is impossible to know how many first wave YouTube Shakespeare videos vanished before our sensibilities and theories adapted to the impact of fan-generated appropriations. It is also impossible to predict what new use of Shakespeare is around the corner. If there is a lesson to be learned, it is that an insistence in measuring Shakespearean appropriations by existing methodologies compromises our desire for relevancy, particularly when people whose interests in Shakespeare make use of unconventional texts and technologies that move faster than our own critical approaches. The emergence of YouTube Shakespeares might have been an unexpected event for Shakespeare scholars, but not for the fans who created them. Because the next wave of Shakespeare appropriation is unpredictable, “we need to adjust to their existence” openly and without skepticism, and perhaps willingly risk disapprobation rather than their loss and our own obsolescence.
Valerie M. Fazel earned her Ph.D. at Arizona State University where she currently teaches academic composition, business writing, and Shakespeare studies for the Department of English. Her research interests include Shakespeare, appropriation, fandom, and social media, and her work is published in Borrowers and Lenders and Shakespeare (co-edited with Louise Geddes). She is co-editor, with Louise Geddes, of The Shakespeare User (Palgrave 2017), and is currently both co-authoring a book with Geddes on Shakespeare fandom (Routledge), and co-editing a collection of essays with Geddes on object-oriented ontology and Shakespeare appropriation (EUP).
