When Pascale Aebischer’s Shakespeare, Spectatorship and the Technologies of Performance was published in 2020, the first lockdown in response to the COVID-19 pandemic was already in place in the UK. In the light of these circumstances, in Viral Shakespeare in the Cambridge Elements series (2021), she reflects on her ‘responses to some of the unique spectatorial configurations, novel experiences and creative innovations that emerged in the time of the pandemic’ (8). The result is a remarkable personal account of the ‘fleeting insights and experiences garnered from watching Shakespeare in lockdown’, which are ‘worth preserving because they speak to a moment of unprecedented intensity and emotional rawness that is profoundly marked by Shakespeare’ (11). ‘Viral’ is, of course, a metaphorical adjective in the digital world that has acquired a distinctive resonance since the beginning of 2020. Aebischer describes an important consequence of the sudden abundance of Shakespeare performances available online: ‘The broadcasts intersect and impact one another so that precursors turn into successors, what follows after can change the meaning of what comes before, and dialogues between productions defy the laws of chronology. The linearity of succession makes way for viral interpenetration, as contagion travels freely between any broadcasts that come into contact’ (25).

This chapter examines the intersection of stigma and mental health in certain sects of Abrahamic religious traditions (including sects of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism). Research has shown people in many religious communities underutilize mental health services. Although there are numerous reasons for this underutilization, the stigma against mental health professionals and treatment in religious communities – religious mental health stigma – and the historical antagonism of psychologists against religious communities are two major reasons. This chapter reviews these factors and discusses how religious communities and mental health professionals can bridge the schism between their groups. We argue that by understanding the needs of religious communities, working within their worldviews, and engaging in respectful ways, psychological researchers and clinicians can build bridges that surmount stigma and other barriers and promote the best care for people in need.

Although ‘film’ remains in common usage as a generic term, digital technology has made it inaccurate when applied to work no longer shot, edited or distributed on chemically coated celluloid. The ‘photochemical era’ has ended, and rapid developments in the distribution and consumption of audio-visual products have reduced distinctions between what is viewed in the home and what is seen in public. This Companion takes as its remit feature-length productions, both those commonly perceived as ‘delivering’ the plays, and those that appropriate them as the starting-point for work that makes no such claim. These are all to some degree adaptations, but some are more adapted than others: consequently the first group of chapters focuses on the various ways in which screen versions of Shakespeare’s works have figured in a changing media environment.

This chapter considers the treatment of ethnic and cultural identity in adaptations of two plays in which they are an integral element, The Merchant of Venice and Othello. Complex characterization is in danger of being short-circuited by unconscious bias, pulling audiences back to racial stereotypes, dehumanizing Shylock and Othello despite the efforts of well-intentioned filmmakers. In The Merchant of Venice anti-Semitism and its consequences in recent and current politics unavoidably complicate a play whose romantic elements are already made uneasy by issues of patriarchal control and materialism. In Othello the challenges of representing ‘the Moor’ himself are not simply resolved by casting an actor of colour in the role. Productions also have to deal with the manner in which agency is wrested from the titular hero by a villain who can seem to have taken charge of way the audience perceives the action.