From Arden to Vrindavan: As You Like It, YouTube Bazaar Notes, and the Creative Remediation of a &#x0201c;Waterloo&#x0201d; Text

Sonali Barua

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Journal of Translation Studies ›› 2021, Vol. 5 ›› Issue (1) : 31-64.

From Arden to Vrindavan: As You Like It, YouTube Bazaar Notes, and the Creative Remediation of a “Waterloo” Text

Sonali Barua

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The YouTube Shakespeare phenomenon has been addressed in several studies including those by Christy Desmet (2009, 2014) and Stephen O’Neill (2014, 2015). This paper builds on their work to examine closely the visual, aesthetic and aural strategies of a YouTube video that seeks to make Shakespeare’s As You Like It more accessible to a group of Bengali-speaking students in small town West Bengal, India. The paper examines (a) the means by which the video creator works to activate prior knowledge in his target viewers, (b) the consequent degree of cognitive success he appears to have achieved in terms of summary and explanation, and (c) this video not just as a teaching tool, but as a piece of creative remediation in its own right, and an original contribution to YouTube Shakespeare. The easy access to the visual dimensions of the global popular afforded by immersion in a digital environment both necessitates and enables more flexible and innovative approaches to bringing alive the sometimes archaic language in canonical literary texts, in this case, Shakespeare’s plays. The paper demonstrates how the video allows the creator to harness the capabilities of one of YouTube’s key pedagogical affordances: the digital image, in conjunction with the site’s potent play and gaming possibilities, as well as the sense of community in shared space that it fosters in regular users. The creator’s deployment of images is apparently idiosyncratic; but these images are culled from a wide variety of online loci that are particularly relevant, comprehensible, and attractive to the demographic he addresses. This strategy enables him to use the exciting possibilities of play, exploration, and cross-cultural connection to engage students effectively in a text recognized as challenging in the Indian context. A related broader argument made here pertains to the role of such digital videos in the shaping of the Global Shakespeare that scholars such as Alexa Huang have highlighted in the last decade. Teaching/explainer videos like the one analyzed in detail here, which combine the exoticism and excitement of globally sourced digital images and the youthful power of play with specific local references and an accessible vernacular voiceover can make a crucial contribution towards reshaping a new generation of glocal non-Anglophone iterations of Shakespeare.

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YouTube / affordances / glocal / remediation / learning community

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Sonali Barua. From Arden to Vrindavan: As You Like It, YouTube Bazaar Notes, and the Creative Remediation of a “Waterloo” Text[J]. Journal of Translation Studies. 2021, 5(1): 31-64

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