Shakespeare: All the web is a stage

In his 1939 poem In Memory of WB Yeats, WH Auden described the strange immortality of literary legacy: “The death of the poet was kept from his poems. / But for him it was his last afternoon as himself... he became his admirers.”

Admirers die just like poets, of course, and most authors can hope for only a brief literary afterlife. A few, however, become something else: a permanent part of culture and language. The mightiest of all such figures is William Shakespeare, who since his death at the age of 52 in April 1616 has become the closest thing the English language has to a presiding deity.

This April, the launch of the World Shakespeare Festival  brings the greatest celebration yet of “the world’s playwright”. And alongside its readings, performances, commissioned art and gatherings, an intriguing digital counterpoint to events is taking place: My Shakespeare – a site dedicated to “measuring Shakespeare’s digital heartbeat” some four centuries after his actual one stopped.

What, then, does an author’s digital heart sound like – and how, in the words of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s artistic director Michael Boyd, “can our understanding of a 17th century English playwright be transformed by new media”?

Above all, these questions are connected by the new kind of relationship being established online between artists and audiences. The theatre is, itself, a space defined by an audience: its energy and ritual driven by live performance. On the page, even words like Shakespeare’s are only half alive.

BBC NEWS