There are hundreds of thousands of Shakespeare videos available on the Web. The emergence of YouTube and other video hosting sites, along with the spread of broadband and the availability of cheap video equipment, has led to an explosion in Shakespeare video production and distribution online.
BardBox is an attempt to bring together some of the best and most interesting of original Shakespeare-related videos on YouTube, Vimeo and other video hosting sites. In 2008, when this site launched, there were 33,000 videos on YouTube searchable under the term ‘shakespeare’; in 2016 this has risen to 1,520,000. The emphasis is on originality. Video hosting sites make available many titles which were created for other media (cinema, television, DVD) and which are often available from other sources. This shows YouTube and others as a new mode of distribution, and although it has made many such titles available this way which would not otherwise be available to most, this aspect does not provide original content – and such activity is, at best, of dubious legality.
BardBox instead concentrates on Shakespeare videos created for distribution on YouTube (launched on Shakespeare’s birthday, 23 April 2005), Vimeo, Daily Motion and others. It comprises animations, parodies, recitations, auditions, promos for theatre productions, amateur records of stage productions, student work, school productions, mashups etc. Each post is named either after the on-screen title of the video or the title it is given on the hosting site, and comprises the video itself, date (the date of posting if actual production date not known), credits (where available), cast (ditto) and duration, description with comment, plus link to its original web page. Each post is described under a variety of categories and tagged under the name of the relevant play.
YouTube Shakespeare has been generally dismissed as home only to facetious and repetitive parodies. BardBox contends that this is an exciting new departure for Shakespeare production, the best examples of which need to be identified, championed and studied. Any suggestions for inclusion will be most welcome (use the comments option below).
Warning! Videos come and go on these sites. Some are removed by their producers, some are taken down by the host site itself (usually if a third party has objected to the use of their material, as in mashups). If titles disappear the BardBox entry will be moved to the Alas, alas section, but it will no longer be possible to view the video.
BardBox was launched in May 2008, and closed in September 2012- at that time I thought for good. But such as been the continuing high quality of online Shakespeare video since then, that I felt I had to return to documenting the phenomenon, and this site was relaunched in March 2016 with a new address, bardbox.net (all old links will resolve to the new one). Hopefully it will continue for a long time yet.
BardBox is produced by Luke McKernan.
Sleek site, Luke, with some genuinely astonishing content.
Will keep popping in…
Thanks Eve. Not quite sure where it’s all going to lead to, but just a sense that it’s a project worth pursuing.
Yours is a most remarkable resource. I’m enormously grateful–and enormously jealous!
Thank you very much!
kj
Outstanding! Blogged at my new Ning network. This will grow and grow
Luke, it’s marvelous. A suggestion: why not present the categories as a tag cloud, as you do with the works? It would be helpful to users (students and scholars alike).
Hi Kathy, thank you for the kind words. Unfortunately there isn’t a cloud option for categories with this template. I have tested other templates but keep coming back to the utilitarian virtues of this one. I’ll keep investigating, depending on how BardBox develops – I can do more with the links, for a start.
Dear Luke:
This is a great site, and what a wonderful resource, thank you!
I wonder if you might be interested in an unusual interpretation of “All The World’s a Stage”:
Cheers!
Brian McGugan
Hi Brian,
What a terrific video. Definitely the sort of thing I’m looking out for. I’m a bit slow in entering videos on the blog, but I will get round to it. It’ll be the second cycling Shakespeare video on the site- is this a whole sub-genre in the making?
Thank you Luke – who knows, it could be an interesting genre indeed! Thank you for looking at my video and for your kind comments and support.
Cheers!
Brian
I think it’s great to have this collection available and organized so thoroughly. I was looking for some Shakespeare videos that are closed captioned. Do you know of any in this collection? Thanks!
It’s pretty much all from YouTube and Vimeo.
Hello. I’m not sure if this is the sort of thing you’d post on the site or not, but it’s quite clever and well done. A story told in Shakespearisms: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2vzv1NlQSM