With the exponential growth of digital formats, literature lives in many multilayered spaces on overlapping platforms for content delivery. Interestingly, many of the emerging forms could be described as hypermedia texts, or expanded books. Shakespeare, a free iPhone application featuring the complete works of Shakespeare (including Edward III and Sir Thomas More), uses the First Folio and the Globe Edition of 1866, and Quartos where applicable. Edited by the PlayShakespeare.com team and coproduced with Readdle, Shakespeare is available for free for iPhone users. Shakespeare Pro is available for $ 2.99, and it includes a Shakespeare portrait gallery, a searchable glossary based on David and Ben Crystal’s Shakespeare's Words, Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare, and other features. Shakespeare made it to Apple’s “App Store Pick of the Week” in July 2009—selected from among the then 65,000 iPhone applications. The app self-consciously mimics an artifact of the print era even as it incorporates a wider spectrum of digital artifacts.
As the new media gives the “airy nothing” of Shakespeare in performance a local and global habitation, the question has shifted from where literature lives to how meanings are formulated, shared, and contested, and to how we might use the new capacity of the Web to handle large video collections to find a new balance between text and performance. Read more ...









