Clifford Werier is Professor of English at Mount Royal University, Canada. His recent publications investigate time across media in Shakespearean jokes and the application of meme theory to the spread of contagious ideas in Coriolanus. He is the co-editor of Shakespeare and Consciousness (2016) and is the interface team leader on the Linked Early Modern Drama Online project.

Paul Budra is Professor of English at Simon Fraser University, Canada. He has published six books and numerous articles on early modern drama and contemporary popular culture. He is the director of SFU Publications and a past president of the Pacific Northwest Renaissance Society.

Introduction

Clifford Werier and Paul Budra

Part 1

Media and the embodied mind

1 Reading Shakespeare: Interface and Cognitive Load

Clifford Werier

2 Shakespeare and Virtual Reality

Rebecca Bushnell and Michael Ullyot

3 All the Game Is a Stage: The Controller and Interface in Shakespearean Videogames Mark Kaethler

4 Voice as Interface

Bruce Smith

Part 2

Apparent designs and hidden grounds

5 Shakespearean Interfaces and Worldmaking: Buried Narratives, Hidden Grounds, and the Culture of Adaptive Practice

Daniel Fischlin

6 What Are Interfaces For, Really?

Gabriel Egan

7 Interface Design and Editorial Theory

Gary Taylor

8 Abstraction as Shakespearean Interface

Jonathan Lamb and Suzanne Tanner

Part 3

Surfaces and depths

9 The Hamlet First Quarto (1603) and the Play of Typography

Erika Boeckeler

10 Desiring Bodies, Divine Violence and Typographic Interfaces in Champ Fleury and Venus and Adonis

Simon Ryle

11 "If you can command these elements": TEI Markup as Shakespearean Interface

Sarah Connell

Part 4

Display, navigation, and functionality

12 "Into a thousand parts divide": The Pursuit of Precision in Shakespeare's Interfaces

Rebecca Niles

13 Does Jonson Break the Data Model? Interrelated Data Models for Early Modern English Drama

Meaghan Brown

14 Browse as Interface in Shakespeare's Texts and The World Shakespeare Bibliography Online

Heidi Craig and Laura Estill

Part 5

User experience

15 "Make Your Best Use of This": A Case Study in User Experience Design for a Shakespeare Interface

Kurt Daw

16 Using Data and Design to Bring the New Variorum Shakespeare Online

Anne Burdick, Laura Mandell, Bryan Tarpley, and Katayoun Torabi

17 Mediating the Shakespeare User's Digital Experience

Eric Johnson and Stacey Redick

Part 6

Staging the interface

18 Access Points: Stage, Space, and/as Interface in the Early Modern Playhouses

Laurie Johnson

19 The Heuristics of Interface: Shakespeare's Cymbeline

Lauren Shohet

20 Shakespeare Through the Bare Thrust Stage Interface

Shoichiro Kawai

Part 7

Interfacing with performance

21 Shakespeare's Walking Story: Site-specific Theater in a Covid World

Gretchen Minton

22 Interfacing Shakespeare Onscreen

Alexa Joubin

23 Front to Front: Enactment as Interface

Mary Hartman

24 Zoom Shakespeare

Paul Budra

The Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Interface provides a ground-breaking investigation into media-specific spaces where Shakespeare is experienced. While such operations may be largely invisible to the average reader or viewer, the interface properties of books, screens, and stages profoundly mediate our cognitive engagement with Shakespeare.
This volume considers contemporary debates and questions including how mobile devices mediate the experience of Shakespeare; the impact of rapidly evolving virtual reality technologies and the interface architectures which condition Shakespearean plays; and how design elements of hypertext, menus, and screen navigation operate within internet Shakespeare spaces. Charting new frontiers, this diverse collection delivers fresh insight into human-computer interaction and user-experience theory, cognitive ecology, and critical approaches such as historical phenomenology. This volume also highlights the application of media and interface design theory to questions related to the medium of the play and its crucial interface with the body and mind.