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YouTube, the world's most watched video website, reaches a broader, more diverse audience than any other Shakespeare performance medium in history. Although only a relatively small portion of YouTube's ever shifting repository of online videos actively plays a role in perpetuating Shakespeare's cultural legacy, the website marks an important shift in the appropriation and transmission of the dramatist's body of work. As Stephen O'Neill notes, "YouTube is now one of the dominant media through which Shakespeare is iterated, produced and received in the twenty-first century" (O'Neill 2014, 3). Arguably, the Shakespeare artifacts YouTubers produce and view affect the future heritage of Shakespeare performance and reception, although specifically the changes that will arise are as unpredictable now as the advent of the website itself was ten years ago. At this juncture, the cultural phenomenon that is YouTube amasses an ever-shifting corpus of eclectic Shakespeare performances that challenge both existing academic assumptions about temporal and trivialized notions of Shakespeare performance and the fundamental methods of textual research long practiced by literary scholars.
While YouTube is a rich resource for Shakespeare performance and reception studies, this also opens a Pandora's Box of ethical issues that have yet to be addressed within Shakespeare studies. These questions expand beyond previous ethical boundaries, guidelines, and applications of literary and performance analysis. The most prominent matter hinges not only on determining a minimally prescribed code of research ethics entailed in public versus private domains, but also on the moral decision-making literary scholars must now consider as they study "published" materials discovered online. This includes special regard for the people responsible for, and visible within, these works.1 Like many online social media networks (SMNs), YouTube is a public forum, available for open, non-response video viewing or, in other words, lurking. However, users who wish to interact -- post videos and/or comments -- on the website register for a YouTube account and agree to its terms of publication. Accordingly, the suggestion that researchers consider ethical obligations to individuals briefed on the public nature of SMN postings may already seem to be a defeated argument.2 After all, many YouTubers agree to "broadcast themselves" publicly. Nevertheless, this raises a question that requires special attention: do YouTubers implicitly sign away all control of how...