'Not all literature is so easily translated into new forms and new media. Most of Shakespeare can be adapted to pretty much any time and place'
Even if William Shakespeare had made it to his 461st birthday today, it's unlikely the famed playwright would have enjoyed a game of pin the tail on the donkey to celebrate.
Born April 23, 1564, and died the same day 52 years later, Shakespeare would have preferred a round of chess or game of cards, maybe even a little (gasp!) gambling, to mark another year around the sun.
Those were the games played in the Middle Ages, not the kids' game, which was invented in the late 1800s and involves a blindfold and picture of an ass, though Shakespeare may have found amusement in the premise.
Julia Wold '25 Ph.D. guesses that Shakespeare would have been fascinated by modern advances in how we play, from rudimentary party games to the $185 billion global video game industry in which players have control over the story in just a flick of a joystick or press of a button.
"As an artist who became more experimental as he got older, I think he would find the possibilities of video games as an art form really interesting and would probably enjoy the interactivity and the opportunity to try out different decisions and see what happens," Wold says. "He strikes me as someone who was very interested in experimenting with new forms of entertainment."
For the last year, Wold, a graduating English scholar, has been a fellow at the UConn Humanities Institute, polishing her dissertation, "Adapting Choice: Shakespeare, Video Games, and Early Modern Thought," a subject that she says brought her joy on even the hardest of days in completing the mechanics of research.
"I wasn't expecting to write a dissertation about video games, but then the game 'Elsinore' came out and in it you play as the character Ophelia from 'Hamlet,' and I found it interesting to consider what changes were being made to the text to give Ophelia power and agency," she says. "Then, I realized I wanted to look at what in Shakespeare's plays is reflective of this culture of games and play and what is revealed about that culture when you adapt one of those plays into a video game."
To Game, or Not to Game
To be clear, there were no video games in Shakespeare's times, but, Wold says, games and game playing were part of everyday life and would have been something in which he engaged. Many around him would have played chess or cards, but betting on sports or other activities was commonplace, albeit more taboo.
Those in the upper class or the nobility would have enjoyed so-called conversational games that could be played without equipment and after dark without the benefit of electricity, games like who-can-contrive-the-best-courting-method-to-nab-a-mate.
Wold says that's something seen clearly in Shakespeare's "Much Ado About Nothing" when the couple Beatrice and Benedick trade romantic barbs in a game of social wit, scoring points off one another as they confess their love.
These kinds of conversational games were popular, in part because in the 1500s people didn't own as many possessions as they do today - never mind the fact that a plastic Scrabble board just simply hadn't been invented. Owning equipment to play a sport, like a bow for archery or racket for tennis, would have been a luxury.
Thus, even a simple guessing game, like guessing the correct casket in "The Merchant of Venice," would have been considered a game, Wold says. But Shakespeare does give an obvious example of game playing in "The Tempest," when Prospero teaches Miranda how to play chess.
"He uses chess to teach her about the world, but he has an agenda. So, chess is used in a way that we're used to seeing in a lot of TV and movies as a metaphorical language about how we control people and how factions work against each other," she says.
See, it started with Shakespeare.
All the World's (His) Stage
Wold says that people in the 16th century also would have considered pantomime or the act of putting on a play a type of game. And that's why Hamlet staging a play in "Hamlet" would have been considered a type of game and a form of play back then.
But complex, detailed stage directions aren't part of Shakespeare's plays - that's a more contemporary thing - and his work is easily molded, which means a modern-day director might ask an actor portraying Romeo to idle their time with Candy Crush while waiting for Juliet in a New York studio apartment. And to the viewer it all still makes sense.
"Not all literature is so easily translated into new forms and new media across time," Wold says. "Most of Shakespeare can be adapted to pretty much any time and place. There are Japanese 'MacBeths.' There are different versions of his plays performed in tribal contexts in Africa. The texts themselves are extremely malleable, and that is a benefit, not a detriment."
Similarly, many video games have narratives that change based on game play and user decisions - To be Team Instinct, or not to be, that is the Pokemon Go question.
Wold points to "A Midsummer Night's Dream" as a good example of how the structure of daily living, its rules and regulations, break away when a group of people are playing a game.
"Think of the Lord of Misrule or the idea that you would take someone from lower down and make them a king for a day. A lot of games or game-like behavior is explicitly interested in the breaking down of norms within a safe, contained space," she explains. "It gives people a safe space to play around with hierarchies without infecting broader society. 'Midsummer Night's Dream' is a great example of that."
She notes, "The character Puck, he's a joker. If we think about the image of the joker card, he very much fits that image."
The PlayStation's the Thing
Modern video gaming itself has morphed into an art form, going from pixelated cartoon graphics to life-like animation replete with fresh musical compositions and human voiceovers. The user interacts with them, engaging more than just hand-eye coordination.
Much of that, Wold argues, hearkens to the act of putting on a play and the interactivity between the numerous people involved: actors, directors, costume designers, and so on. Each genre involves many hands and fully engages an audience.
What's more, a video game can be played differently with each round as a player elects different paths and makes different decisions; Arthur Morgan most often dies of tuberculosis in Red Dead Redemption 2, but a bullet is another possibility based on choices made along the way.
So, too, can a theatrical performance change from matinee to evening as actors make subtle changes – let's say adding or subtracting a wry smile, each time they take the stage.
"Shakespeare's influence is everywhere," Wold says. "If you want to be a culturally media literate person, you need to know Shakespeare. His work is the foundation of a lot of cultural references, allusions, and influences. So many of our linguistics and turns of phrase originated with him.
"This isn't something you need to be thinking about 24/7 or accept 100% of the time," she continues, "but when you want to look for it, you can find his influence. He's ubiquitous, and a lot of modern gaming is based on this idea of a game space as the way that we understand it from Shakespeare."
