This paper presents Shakespeare-VR, a digital humanities project that investigates how immersive virtual environments can transform the experience of theatrical engagement. While digital Shakespeare has long incorporated archives, editions, and performance documentation, most virtual-reality applications in the humanities remain focused on visualization or reconstruction. Shakespeare-VR instead treats virtual reality as an analytic instrument, using immersive design to explore how interpretation, embodiment, and attention operate in performance.

The project began with a documentary study of the American Shakespeare Center’s Blackfriars Playhouse, the only active reconstruction of Shakespeare’s indoor theatre. Using architectural photography, 360-degree video, and staged performance capture, this phase produced both an archival record and a dataset for virtual reconstruction. Building on this foundation, the project’s central component, Sweet Sorrow: Romeo and Juliet in Virtual Reality, recreates the Blackfriars environment as a fully navigable digital space. Motion-captured performances by professional actors are integrated into a 3D model that allows users to move through the theatre, experiencing scenes from multiple vantage points.

Rather than presenting Shakespeare as a fixed performance object, the project foregrounds the dynamic relationship between space, perception, and audience participation. Users are not positioned as passive viewers but as mobile participants whose interpretive experience is shaped by proximity, perspective, and embodied presence. In this way, Shakespeare-VR both recovers aspects of early modern theatrical practice—such as fluid audience positioning and shared spatial awareness—and generates new forms of interpretive agency unique to virtual environments.

The paper argues that immersive media can function simultaneously as research methodology and pedagogical platform. By integrating creative design with critical inquiry, Shakespeare-VR demonstrates how virtual reality can support new approaches to performance studies, digital pedagogy, and the study of cultural memory. More broadly, it proposes a model for digital humanities work in which making and interpretation operate together to produce knowledge, reimagining engagement not as a passive encounter with text but as an embodied, participatory process.