Juliet, I Prosume?

or Shakespeare and the Social Network

Authors

Kirk Hendershott-Kraetzer Olivet College

Abstract

Cluster: Shakespearean / Social Media Identities

Though it may come as little surprise that Juliet is a popular character on Facebook, it may surprise how popular she is: in late 2013, there were at least 3,500 of her populating the social media platform. This essay inquires into what is being said about Juliet on Facebook. How is she being represented? Are there patterns to be found? If so, what might those patterns suggest about whether scholarly understandings of the character are shared in the broader culture? Like the sheer number of Facebook Juliets, the answers to these questions are surprising. Although some Juliets on Facebook may be phoned-in, disengaged, or just plain silly, even their silliness reveals individual account holders who are engaged in some way with Shakespeare and reveals how those account holders have come to understand him and his works. Through a complex intersection of negotiation, resistance, and prosumption, we see not just reconfigurations of the character Juliet, but a reconfiguration of Juliet as what Leisha Jones calls the "digital collective subject" (2011, 448), as well as a reconfiguration of Juliet's relationship with the world. This process happens not through the actions of an individual (like Shakespeare) but through the actions of thousands of individuals operating independently of each other; at the same time, many of these individuals are remaking themselves and others as Juliet. Facebook Juliet participates in Romeo and Juliet's already-long history of adaptation as well as in long-established debates over what constitutes the essential, authentic Shakespeare; she demonstrates new ways of thinking about the character Juliet, including ways in which individuals relate to authorities of various stripes and relate Juliet to themselves; she reveals the workings of a variety of aspects of our culture; and she models how to think about identity, identity construction, even reality itself in a social media world.

Author Biography

Kirk Hendershott-Kraetzer, Olivet College

Kirk Hendershott-Kraetzer is Professor of Humanities and Co-Director of the Global Citizen Honors Program at Olivet College, where he teaches Shakespeare, film, creative writing, composition and rhetoric, and literature. His longstanding research interest is performances of Shakespearean texts in film and television, with more recent forays into the construction of knowledge and identity and into representations of Shakespeare in social media.