Media innovation as nothing new

Mediatic Shakespeare: The Dynamics of Orality, Script, and Print in the Plays and Poems
by Richard Cavell

Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2025
$85  /  9781487565367

Reviewed by Natalie Virginia Lang

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The media we consume impacts our perception of the world, the way we behave, and even society’s structural fabric. This is true of social media, internet, radio, digital and physical print, video games, your favourite streaming service, and even ChatGPT. Media theory is a field of study aimed at examining this impact. Media theorists study the relationship between people and media forms, with the central question asking how media affects public consciousness and social structures (with or without our acute awareness).

Our era is saturated with unprecedented cultural upheaval. Now is a time of shifting social conditions, rapidly adapting media forces, and the reshaping of how we interact with one another. When media is brought into the conversation, one might ask whether it is shaped by the society we built or if society is shaped by the media we have unleashed. It’s very much a chicken and egg question. A question which might feel new to us, but one which has been explored many times throughout history during other eras of equally traumatic upheaval—one such time is that in which William Shakespeare lived.

In his new book, Mediatic Shakespeare: The Dynamics of Orality, Script, and Print in the Plays and Poems, media theorist and UBC Professor Richard Cavell examines media’s impact on social and cultural change in Shakespeare’s time. He explores how the creation of the printing press in 1440 contributed to massive change in societies as dominant media transformed from spoken traditions to print materials. This change was in full swing, changing the very way society functioned, when Shakespeare began writing.

While Shakespeare’s plays were written by hand, often landing in actors’ hands while rehearsals were already in progress, Cavell argues in Mediatic Shakespeare that the rapid spread of print media shaped much of Shakespeare’s work. Evidence of this influence can be found weaved throughout nearly all of Shakespeare’s writing.

According to Cavell, the bard was acutely aware of shifting media cultures in his time. He resented what that shift meant for society. As a result, there are many threads to be found throughout the posthumously published plays and poems which point to Shakespeare’s nostalgia for the communal nature of spoken word storytelling, as well as his mistrust of printed and handwritten forms of communication. One such example (among countless others), as painstakingly explained by Cavell, exists throughout Romeo and Juliet. In this play, it could be argued that it was the printed word which served as the catalyst to initiate the dramatic love story between two young people from feuding households. It is also the printed word which, in the end, led to their tragic demise:

It was with the written invitation to a party that the play and its tragic consequences began, and at the beginning of act 4 the play appears to be repeating itself, with Capulet’s instruction to his servingman: “So many guests invite as here are writ” (4.2.1-2). As with the opening invitation, this one, along with Friar Laurence’s letter to Romeo, becomes a harbinger of death through Friar John’s failure to deliver it, and Romeo’s letter to his father will likewise tell of his own death. Romeo’s fate (together with that of Paris) is written in “sour misfortune’s book” (5.3.82) and that fate, along with Juliet’s will be given a profoundly ironic memorial in golden “statue[s]” (5.3.299) their parents propose to raise of them, these statues constituting the ultimate triumph of visual culture.

Cavell draws on media theorists like Marshall McLuhan, Friedrich Kittler, and Bernhard Siegert, to tirelessly trace not only Shakespeare’s awareness of the culture shifts of his time, but his active engagement in examining impacts on social life. The media ecology within Shakespeare’s time, as with ours today, was fluctuating at an incredible pace. As a result, many, including Shakespeare, pushed back against such shifts through the art they created. Some of these are seen in subtle storytelling elements, while others are openly critical of the direction society was moving in as in Shakespeare’s Richard the Second where there is great discussion over the “fall of speech.”

Richard Cavell’s expertly cited study of Shakespeare’s plays and poems, is structured across four chapters. Within these chapters, the media ecology of Shakespeare’s time is parsed out, exposing just how unsettling new forms of media can be on a society. Cavell collects an incredible amount of primary and secondary sources to help the reader closely examine this unsettling nature of media flux, how that flux can break down the so-called sensus communis, and what implications these shifts have on the structure and functionality of society.

Readers of Cavell’s book won’t just come away with a valuable resource for Shakespeare’s works as well as a deep understanding of media theory, they will find themselves asking a variety of philosophical questions about how media impacts every aspect of life, including how it evolves, how writers and artists comment on cultural change, and what we may lose as a society through such so-called media innovation.

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Natalie Virginia Lang is a teacher and writer. She is an alumnus of the Graduate Liberal Studies program at SFU and has contributed essays to The British Columbia Review: “Living with Oil?,” “Remnants of Sumas Mountain,” and “Letters from the Pandemic: Dear Will.”  Lang is the author of Remnants: Reveries of a Mountain Dweller (Caitlin Press, 2023), a memoir inviting readers to re-examine our relationships with the natural world. [Editor’s note: Natalie Virginia Lang has reviewed books by Scott McIntyre, Elspeth Bradbury, Kate J. Neville, Steven Earle, Betsy Warland, and Christina Myers for The British Columbia Review.]

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Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
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Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

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