Abstract
This chapter argues that fan audiences offer opportunities to rethink audience studies, because engagement is defined by participation rather than attendance. The shift to Web 2.0, this chapter contends, has created asynchronous audiences who not only define theater as an intertextual experience, but reimagine it through speculative participation, based equally on lived experience and imagined theaters. These imagined theaters coalesce to generate new Shakespearean microperformances, and the material traces that these performances leave offer scholars and artists new opportunities to understand twenty-first-century theater audiences.
This chapter argues that fan audiences offer opportunities to rethink audience studies, because engagement is defined by participation rather than attendance. If we conflate these two communities, we might understand fan production—memes, fan art, and fanfic—as imaginary performances. By creating speculative microperformances, fans affirm their role as keepers of cultural memory and assert themselves as creative consumers, requiring a conceptual adjustment of our definition of the Shakespearean audience as it navigates between the ephemeral and the embodied. Fandom, particularly as it pertains to imagined theaters, facilitates risk, as audiences are invited to participate in accepting the premise of the performance and risk degrees of participation by sharing or adding to the meme. That is to say, if one defines the Shakespeare audience in terms of fandom, one understands the audience as something that self-identifies as such and can therefore exist before and after the playhouse experience has occurred.