Theater History in 3D: The Digital Early Modern in the Age of the Interface

I n her essay for the twenty-fifth anniversary special issue of English Literary Renaissance (1995), Leah Marcus took the risk I take in my contribution to this fiftieth anniversary issue: writing about how early modern studies has been transformed by and has in turn impacted the computer age. The topic is tricky because digital technology changes so rapidly, quickly dating or disproving the kind of speculative or visionary claims that the anniversary essay genre expects. For instance, Marcus’ 1995 essay remarked on the conversion of literary and critical texts into CD-ROM format, a format that turned out to be so short-lived that many of today’s students have never even heard of it, let alone considered using it for their digital scholarly projects. The essay also conjectured that scholars would be “slow to surrender the familiar tactile and visual elements of book reading to the very different demands of the computer” (396), which “cannot be held comfortably in the hand” (397). Who could have anticipated that about 15 years later, Apple would release the iPad, the hand-held device on which I readMarcus’ essay recently, using my Apple “pencil” to make notes on the screen in just the way I would have were I reading a printed version of her text. The experience of reading computer-generated texts today has come closer to the experience of reading printed texts than anyone could have suspected it would become twenty-five years ago. Marcus hardly could have known what was around the corner in 1995, but the value of her essay is that its primary focus is not prognostication about technological unknowns. Instead, it takes stock of how changes in digital technology were intersecting in the mid-nineties with more traditional areas of scholarly inquiry, explaining why early modernists were