The Infinite Monkey Theorem is an idea frequently encountered in mass market science books, discourse on Intelligent Design, and debates on the merits of writing produced by chatbots. According to the Theorem, an infinite number of typing monkeys will eventually generate the works of Shakespeare. Shakespeare and Nonhuman Intelligence is a metaphysical analysis of the Bard's function in the Theorem in various contexts over the past century. Beginning with early-twentieth century astrophysics and ending with twenty-first century AI, it traces the emergence of Shakespeare as the embattled figure of writing in the age of machine learning, bioinformatics, and other alleged crimes against the human organism. In an argument that pays close attention to computer programs that instantiate the Theorem, including one by biologist Richard Dawkins, and to references in publications on Intelligent Design, it contends that Shakespeare performs as an interface between the human and our Others: animal, god, machine.

This book argues that Shakespeare and various cultures of celebrity have enjoyed a ceaselessly adaptive, symbiotic relationship since the final decade of the sixteenth century, through which each entity has contributed to the vitality and adaptability of the other. In five chapters, Jennifer Holl explores the early modern culture of theatrical celebrity and its resonances in print and performance, especially in Shakespeare’s interrogations of this emerging phenomenon in sonnets and histories, before moving on to examine the ways that shifting cultures of stage, film, and digital celebrity have perpetually recreated the Shakespeare, or even the #shakespeare, with whom audiences continue to interact. Situated at an intersection of multiple critical conversations, this book will be of great interest to scholars and graduate students of Shakespeare and Shakespearean appropriations, early modern theater, and celebrity studies.

Having a conscience distinguishes humans from the most advanced A.I. systems. Acting in good conscience, consulting one’s conscience, and being conscience-wracked are all aspects of human intelligence that involve reckoning (deriving general laws from particular inputs and vice versa), and judgement (contemplating the relationship of the reckoning system to the world). While A.I. developers have mastered reckoning, they are still working towards the creation of judgement. This book sheds light on the reckoning and judgement of conscience by demonstrating how these concepts are explored in Everyman, Doctor Faustus, The Merchant of Venice, and Hamlet. Academic, student, or general-interest readers discover the complexity and multiplicity of the early modern concept of conscience, which is informed by the scholastic intellectual tradition, juridical procedures of the court of Chancery, the practical advice of Protestant casuistry, and Reformation theology. The aims are to examine the rubrics for thinking through, regulating, and judging actions that define the various consciences of Shakespeare’s day, to use these rubrics to interpret questions of truth and action in early modern plays, and to offer insights into what it is about conscience that developers want to grasp to eliminate the difference between human and non-human intelligences, and achieve true A.I.

What if you found yourself working for an intelligence agency and suddenly your understanding of other human beings had become a matter of life or death? Yair Neuman draws us into a unique thought experiment, using portraits from some of Shakespeare’s most stirring works to illustrate how our psychological understanding of human nature can be significantly enriched through literature. Provocative and engaging, Shakespeare for the Intelligence Agent: Toward Understanding Real Personalities invites you to a challenging, enjoyable, and in many cases humorous reading of human personality through Shakespeare’s plays.

This volume collects essays written over the last decade by one of the founders and leading figures of the theoretical movement of critical posthumanism. The readings of literary texts gathered here, from Shakespeare, Keats, Camus, Vittorini, Kundera, Haushofer, Atwood, Eagleman, Crace and DeLillo, focus on ‘posthumanist moments’ in which questions of postanthropocentrism and the nonhuman become prominent, are negotiated and ultimately foreclosed. They show how a deconstructively-minded way of reading humanistically-motivated texts can help making these texts relevant for our so-called ‘posthuman times’. In doing so, these critical posthumanist readings demonstrate that literature remains one of the privileged cultural institutions and practices from which solidarities both with and between the human and nonhuman can be formed and negotiated.

Floating daggers, enchanted handkerchiefs, supernatural storms, and moving statues have tantalized Shakespeare’s readers and audiences for centuries. The essays in Shakespeare’s Things: Shakespearean Theatre and the Non-Human World in History, Theory, and Performance renew attention to non-human influence and agency in the plays, exploring how Shakespeare anticipates new materialist thought, thing theory, and object studies while presenting accounts of intention, action, and expression that we have not yet noticed or named. By focusing on the things that populate the plays—from commodities to props, corpses to relics—they find that canonical Shakespeare, inventor of the human, gives way to a lesser-known figure, a chronicler of the ceaseless collaboration among persons, language, the stage, the object world, audiences, the weather, the earth, and the heavens.

A series of intellectual provocations that investigate the creative process across the human-nonhuman spectrum. Is it possible that creative artists have more in common with machines than we might think? Employing an improvisational call-and-response writing performance coauthored with an AI text generator, remix artist and scholar Mark Amerika, interrogates how his own "psychic automatism" is itself a nonhuman function strategically designed to reveal the poetic attributes of programmable worlds still unimagined. Through a series of intellectual provocations that investigate the creative process across the human-nonhuman spectrum, Amerika critically reflects on whether creativity itself is, at root, a nonhuman information behavior that emerges from an onto-operational presence experiencing an otherworldly aesthetic sensibility. Amerika engages with his cyberpunk imagination to simultaneously embrace and problematize human-machine collaborations. He draws from jazz performance, beatnik poetry, Buddhist thought, and surrealism to suggest that his own artificial creative intelligence operates as a finely tuned remix engine continuously training itself to build on the history of avant-garde art and writing. Playful and provocative, My Life as an Artificial Creative Intelligence flips the script on contemporary AI research that attempts to build systems that perform more like humans, instead self-reflexively making a very nontraditional argument about AI's impact on society and its relationship to the cosmos.

Shakespeare’s plays have a long and varied performance history. The relevance of his plays in literary studies cannot be understated, but only recently have scholars been looking into the presence and significance of animals within the canon. Readers will quickly find—without having to do extensive research—that the plays are teeming with animals! In this Handbook, Karen Raber and Holly Dugan delve deep into Shakespeare’s World to illuminate and understand the use of animals in his span of work. This volume supplies a valuable resource, offering a broad and thorough grounding in the many ways animal references and the appearance of actual animals in the plays can be interpreted. It provides a thorough overview; demonstrates rigorous, original research; and charts new frontiers in the field through a broad variety of contributions from an international group of well-known and respected scholars.

This urgent and provocative study explores contemporary Shakespeare performance to bring a sense of theatre as technology into view. Rather than merely using technologies, the theatre's distinctively intermedial character is essential to its complex technicity; the changing function of gesture and costume, of written documents in the making of performance, of light and sound, and of the interplay of live and recorded acting complicate the sense of theatre as a medium. In a series of probing discussions, Worthen interrogates the interaction of live and mediated acting onstage, the impact of written media from the handwritten scroll to the small-screen app in acting as a technē, the work of Original Practices as an interactive modern theatre technology, the economies of theatrical immersion, and the consequences of an emerging algorithmic theatre, providing a richly theoretical reading of the stakes of theatre as an always-emerging technology.

Combining the latest scientific and philosophical understanding of humankind's place in the world with interpretative methods derived from other politically inflected literary criticism, ecocriticism is providing new insights into literary works both ancient and modern. With case-study analyses of the tragedies, comedies, histories and late romances, this book is a wide-ranging introduction to reading Shakespeare in the light of contemporary ecocritical theory.