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Introduction: Bernard Shaw and New Media

2020; Penn State University Press; Volume: 40; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/shaw.40.1.0001

1529-1480

Jennifer Buckley,

Literature Analysis and Criticism

During the summer of 2015, George Bernard Shaw's drama became “new media” in a broadly recognizable and distinctly twenty-first-century way. On 14 May, the Royal National Theatre broadcast a live digital feed of Simon Godwin's high-profile production of Man and Superman to movie theaters and art centers across the United Kingdom and Europe. Over the coming weeks and months, a recording of that feed would be screened in dozens of locations, from Manchester to Madison, and from Auckland to Ann Arbor, during what the NT Live series calls “encore presentations.” At all of these screenings, audiences watched and listened for approximately 225 minutes as Ann Whitefield (Indira Varma) chased Jack Tanner (Ralph Fiennes) to hell and back.They also saw and heard the audience gathered at London's Lyttleton Theatre on 14 May. In a manner similar to the Metropolitan Opera Live in HD series—one model for the NT's own broadcasts, which commenced in 2009—producers supplemented the feed of the actors' performance with views of the West End audience settling into their seats before and after the show and during intermission. Due to Man and Superman's notoriously extreme length, cinema audiences were deprived of (or perhaps spared) the preshow introductions, interviews, and short informative films that usually accompany the performance feed. They were, however, shown advertisements promoting NT Live's mission: to distribute “the best of British theatre” across the globe, using cutting-edge digital technologies to produce the feeling of synchronous, collective, embodied reception that was for so long identified as live theater's distinguishing trait—and sometimes still is, despite the compelling arguments made by performance scholars that, as Sarah Bay-Cheng puts it, “theater is media.”1According to NT Live's publicity, the plays are not all that is “the best” about its broadcasts. Because the cameras were so “carefully positioned throughout the auditorium” at the Lyttleton, every cinema spectator had “the ‘best seat in the house’ view”—a view that is in fact composed of multiple views, shot by multiple cameras, digitally stitched into what feels like a single, seamless perspective.2 Shaw devotees unable to attend a live performance in London could experience the “liveness” of an NT Live screening—which, depending on one's priorities and one's appreciation of cinematic close-up shots, might even seem better than the “real thing” at the Lyttleton.3 Attempting to leverage both relative novelty (digital broadcast technologies) and relative familiarity (a modern classic in a high-profile production, led by an established star of stage and screen), NT Live was betting that Bernard Shaw and new media would be a winning combination. It was a good bet, though the combination of Shakespeare and this particular new medium has turned out to be a more popular and lucrative one for NT Live. (Its Hamlet alone has attracted one million viewers and counting—exponentially more than Man and Superman is likely to reach, even if NT Live does offer more encore screenings in the coming years.4 This is an unsurprising outcome, given Shakespeare's undiminished global renown and the production's very starry star, Benedict Cumberbatch; it's also one that would especially irk the Bard-bashing Shaw).It is more than apt that producers and users of this new medium would incorporate Shaw into their efforts to build a twenty-first-century theater audience via satellite. Shaw himself was intensely interested in the emergent and established media of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries; moreover, early producers of his era's developing mass media had also bet on his appeal, as readers of previously published Shaw scholarship know well. From the BBC's earliest days, the radio service incorporated into its programming Shaw's public talks, debates, plays, and opinions on pronunciation—though not without serious behind-the-microphone tensions, as L. W. Conolly has shown. Perhaps coincidentally, almost a century ago the very first of Shaw's plays transmitted for a geographically distributed audience was also Man and Superman, an excerpt of which the BBC appears to have broadcast on 1 December 1923 without Shaw's authorization.5 As Conolly details, the relationship between Shaw and the fledgling broadcaster was repaired (then stressed again, and then repaired, and so on). A 1929 broadcast of Saint Joan was “then the most significant radio broadcast drama in BBC history,” as Lawrence Switzky, a contributor to this issue, has elsewhere noted.6 While launching its Third Programme in 1946, the corporation again turned to Shaw and his Don Juan play, transmitting a live, full-length Man and Superman over five and a half hours of airtime.7 Like the NT now does, BBC Radio repackaged the live content as a recording; in this case, the service replayed the initial broadcast several times, both in its entirety and in parts. Indeed, upon Shaw's death in 1950, the Third Programme marked his many contributions to its development by playing that 1946 recording of Act III.8Shaw and his plays were important to the formation of BBC Television, too. Although Luigi Pirandello was the first playwright whose drama the service transmitted to London televisions, VHF Band 1 carried images of Shaw's plays early and relatively often, starting with How He Lied to Her Husband in 1937.9 Invited to Alexandra Palace to witness and comment, live and on camera, upon the performance and the new medium, Shaw was “‘jocular’” but uncomplimentary. (One does wonder just what the producers expected when they asked Shaw to provide post-show commentary.) While behind the scenes he “‘showed great interest in the equipment, transmitters, and studio,’” before and after the production he worried—like some of our own contemporaries do about ventures like NT Live—whether mass-mediated drama would reduce or even eliminate the audience for live performance in theaters.10The relationship between theater and cinema had occupied Shaw's publicly expressed thoughts since the days in which he, like others, referred to that new medium as the cinematograph. A professed “movie fan” who demonstrated a remarkably early and acute understanding of what stage drama did and did not share with film, Shaw was wary of producers who desired to film his plays, which didn't stop the burgeoning industry from seizing upon them to mixed results.11 (Moreover, Shaw was already a shrewd media critic in 1914, arguing that the cinematograph “is educating you far more effectively when you think it is only amusing you than when it is avowedly instructing you in the habits of lobsters.”)12Fascinating and significant as the NT Live broadcast is, and substantial as Shaw's engagements with predigital mass media were, this special issue takes up other, less frequently discussed nodes in the Bernard-Shaw-and-new-media nexus. This is in part because the extant scholarship on Shaw's engagements with film, radio, television, and print is so robust, as is the growing body of publications on the digital broadcasting of theater productions.13 But it is also because the issue's approach to that nexus rests upon a historically contingent definition of what counts as new, and an expanded sense of what constitutes a medium. First, we depart from colloquial usage by encompassing nondigital media within the category of the “new.” In doing so, we are following cultural historians including Lisa Gitelman, whose books Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture (2006) and New Media, 1740–1915 (co-edited with Geoffrey B. Pingree, 2003) helped shape not only the field we now call “media archeology,” but also methodologies in Victorian and modernist studies broadly speaking.14 Gitelman is among the best known of a growing cadre of scholars who reject a linear model of media history in which nascent technologies, upon assuming (one) right and proper form, give way to newer, better ones. Gitelman and her fellow historians have offered complex, carefully researched accounts that demonstrate how inventors' and early users' understandings of almost any medium diverge—sometimes widely—from what eventually became standard beliefs and practices. Gitelman has written frequently about phonography, with which Shaw was obsessed. The most obvious theatrical product of that obsession is Pygmalion, which has not been neglected by media historians and theorists. A prominent, though brief, engagement with Shaw's play occurs in Friedrich A. Kittler's widely influential Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (German 1986; English 1999). For Kittler, Pygmalion dramatizes the transition from humanism to posthumanism in Eliza Doolittle's phonographically enabled transformation from “soul” to “sound” producer.15 Those working in sound studies have attended to Eliza and Henry Higgins, too; the characters and their creator make appearances in Jonathan Sterne's, John Durham Peters's, and Benjamin Steege's histories of hearing and listening, where Higgins serves as a paradigmatic technologically empowered expert.16Pygmalion plays a role in this issue, and so does Kittler. Readers of an issue titled Bernard Shaw and New Media likely expected that much. What you will not (I think) have anticipated is the critical uses to which the play and the theorist are put in these pages by Switzky (Pygmalion) and Joshua Reeves (Kittler). Likewise, if you know anything at all about Shaw, you probably know about the “GBS” persona, and how cannily he used printed photographic images to craft it for a global public sphere.17 If you've read a biography, you know he was himself a skilled and prolific amateur photographer. (If you were in Ireland or England during 2011, you may even have seen Shaw's photographs prominently exhibited at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in “The Moderns: The Arts in Ireland from the 1900s to the 1970s,” and at the London School of Economics and the National Trust's “Man and Cameraman” show.)18 But the remarkable extent to which he understood and utilized photography as a new art medium is fully illuminated here by Alice McEwan, who studies in depth Shaw's work behind and in front of the camera—or, rather, particular types of cameras, along with specific lenses and printing techniques. That said, the issue does not overlook Shaw's connections to twenty-first-century digital technologies. Indeed, Switzky's account of computer scientists' first attempts to create natural language processing programs—early versions of the software that now powers digital personal assistants like Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa—convincingly locates Shaw and his thinking about human and artificial intelligence at the heart of their experiments. José Luis Oncins-Martínez extends the issue's commentary on Shaw and computing by using digital methodologies to explore the circulations, denotations, and connotations of the term “Shavian” during the playwright's lifetime and in the present. Together, these essays explore a range of approaches to the Bernard Shaw–new media nexus—approaches that themselves suggest more possibilities for more new scholarship.In “Shaw's Photojournalism: The Art of Self-Promotion,” McEwan not only builds upon the scholarship on Shaw's passion for photography and his public uses of that medium but also offers us a fuller understanding of Shaw's “participation in visual culture” as a maker and a subject of photographic images. Engaging with recent work on Shaw and celebrity (including work by SHAW general editor Christopher Wixson), McEwan shows how new photographic technologies drove developments in print culture, enabling Shaw to seize genres including illustrated magazines and tabloids to cultivate his public persona. Detailing Shaw's experimentation with cameras from 1898, when he purchased his first handheld Kodak box, through the next decade, McEwan shows Shaw's significance to the emergence of photojournalism and, more broadly, to the relations between high art and mass culture. Carefully situating Shaw's association with photography in its historical context, McEwan's essay contributes not only to Shaw studies but also to modernist media history.Print journalism is also important to the account of Shaw's responses to World War I offered by Reeves. However, his essay expands the issue's approach to media by explaining how Shaw's various engagements with the war were technologically mediated—whether those engagements involved writing and reading in England or firsthand experience at the Belgian front. In “Common Senselessness about the War: On Shaw's Media Delirium,” Reeves draws on Kittler's and Paul Virilio's theories of mediation and human sensory perception to argue that for Shaw, his experiences with the press and at the front both constitute “theaters of engagement.” Shaw notoriously objected to the war, yet Reeves emphasizes that the writer was, by his own account, vulnerable not only to his own sensorial “recalibration” by “‘Ypres and its orchestra,’” but also capable of responding to war's world-shattering violence in aesthetic terms. In doing so, Reeves, too, brings Shaw studies into line with modernist studies.Switzky's essay, “ELIZA Effects: Pygmalion and the Early Development of Artificial Intelligence,” brings the issue's study of Shaw and new media into the computer age. The proper name in the title refers to one of Shaw's best-known dramatic characters, of course, but the capital letters indicate one of her best-known namesakes: the natural language processing program built by Joseph Weizenbaum in the 1960s. As Switzky explains, the phrase “ELIZA effect” describes humans' attribution of human-like qualities—particularly intelligence—to responsive computer programs like chatbots and virtual assistants. While Shaw's character is often ignored in the scientific discourse around ELIZA effects, Switzky shows that both Eliza Doolittle and her creator were very much on the minds of the computer programmers who pioneered artificial intelligence technologies. Demonstrating the admiration for Shaw held by Alan Turing, the British mathematician and computer scientist whose team broke the German military code during World War II, Switzky offers a reading of Pygmalion informed by Turing's and Weizenbaum's readings of the play, and especially their understandings of its central character's intelligence. One of the essay's more significant contributions to Shaw studies is Switzky's analysis of the feminine terms in which the play's male characters—like twenty-first-century programmers—cast care providers, whether those providers are computers or humans.Computing provides not only the subject but also one of the methods taken up by Oncins-Martínez in “Shavian Media: The Meaning of ‘Shavian’ after Shaw.” Tracing the shifting meanings of that adjective from its reputed origins in Shaw's conversation with William Morris to its appearances in online English corpora, Oncins-Martínez shows what “Shavian” has meant, and what it means now, in a multitude of verbal contexts. Some of these are familiar, like the deliberately constructed connections between the term and the GBS persona who appears in McEwan's essay. Other associations are understudied—like the manner in which the so-called “Shavian reversal” is used in educational computer gaming circles—or even unexpected, such as the appeal the Shaw Alphabet (inaccurately but frequently called “Shavian”) holds for the cryptographers working in Turing's wake. It is in this final essay that “Bernard Shaw and New Media” finally takes up new media like Twitter and Instagram, where Oncins-Martínez follows @shawalphabet and #shavian.calligraphy, respectively—and you can, too, if you yourself are among the billions of new media producers who use these applications.We conclude the issue with the first of two tributes to the late Stanley Weintraub, a longtime pillar of Shaw studies. There, Wixson and previous general editor Michel Pharand offer us all an opportunity to reflect upon and celebrate a formidable scholar and generous mentor, whom we were fortunate to see live to a Shavian age.