Shakespeare and Artificial Intelligence: A Critical Introduction

Filled with figures who act in ways that unsettle the boundaries of the human, Shakespeare’s works offer a distinctive set of conceptual resources for thinking about generative AI. At the same time, AI raises long-standing questions of authorship, embodiment, and social justice, making clear that the humanities must be central to understanding what kinds of worlds these technologies both produce and threaten. Shakespeare's plays repeatedly return to questions of simulation, prediction, virtual experience, and uncertain knowledge – the very questions that have become newly urgent in the age of AI. Shakespeare imagined systems of intelligence: processual, manipulative, and generative. Shakespearean virtual worlds and soliloquies provide a framework for thinking about AI-generated virtuality and about identity as something constituted though language and performance. This article examines the long durée of technicity in literary history and situates AI within longer debates about how literary works are made, authorised, and contested as they move across media and institutions. The essays in this special issue interrogate this long history, using Shakespeare and early modern studies not simply as analogies for AI but as ways of testing AI’s claims to intelligence and authority. In turn, the special issue asks what encounters with AI reveal about the methods and objectives of Shakespeare studies itself.