Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Since the earliest days of hypertext, techno-scholars have enthused about the potential of the electronic medium. Even before the advent of the World Wide Web, there were some remarkable trailblazers, each giving some sense of the way that a hypertextual, multimedia environment could enhance our reading experience of Shakespeare’s texts: the Shakespeare Project spearheaded by Larry Friedlander (1984; see Friedlander 1991) and Voyager’s Macbeth, released for the Macintosh platform in 1994, for example. The exponential expansion of the World Wide Web has put Shakespeare-related materials on the monitors of computers around the world, in impressive variety: witness the extensive links to resources listed in major “gateways” or “portals” dedicated to Shakespearean materials (Gray; Internet Shakespeare Editions, “Links,” for example). It comes therefore as something of a surprise that two decades later, with the medium expanding at a speed only the most visionary would have anticipated, the potential of a Shakespearean text wholly designed for the electronic medium is not yet fully realized. There are no obvious theoretical constraints. In the early days of the medium, there were perceptive theoretical discussions of the potential of the electronic text, led by George Landow (1992, 1994) and Jay David Bolter (1991); in the field of English literary studies hypertext as a medium received ... log in or subscribe to read full text