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IN the fall of 1996, 1 was lucky enough to be in New York City when Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet opened in all its 70 mm glory at the Paris Theatre. During the summer of 2009, 1 watched the same film on the two-inch screen of an iPod. Although this variation of screen size is admittedly extreme, these two experiences underscore key features in twenty-first-century digitized performance: multiple screens, multiple technologies, and proliferating mechanisms of audience control. Shakespearean film faces a digital world.
The year after Branagh's Hamlet was released, Janet H. Murray analyzed digital narrative and predicted "a continued loosening of the traditional boundaries between games and stories, between films and rides, between broadcast media (like television and radio) and archival media (like books and videotape), between narrative forms (like books) and dramatic forms (like theater or film), and even between the authence and the author."1 However, Murray could not have anticipated how many different kinds of screens would become sites for twenty-first-century literary and cinematic boundary-loosening. Beyond television and movie theaters, our computer screens now host streaming video of Shakespearean performances, including Peter Donaldson's Shakespeare Performance in Asia Web site (http://web.mit.edu/shakespeare/asia/) and Ian McKellan's King Lear, which currently airs on demand on the PBS Web site (http://video.pbs.org/video/1075274407/program/9793 59658). 2 Several Shakespearean films are now available through digital pay-per-view from iTunes. In addition, Shakespeare's texts appear on WebTV, our computer screens, and Amazon's Kindle screens as e-books.
What has followed "Shakespeare on film" is Shakespeare on screens. Because we now find Shakespeare's works on a range of these performance/textual surfaces, the technologies that enable these encounters, enrich them, and render them all-too-swiftly obsolete will continually influence Shakespearean film in the twentyfirst century. At the least, Shakespearean film will become a crucial archive for creative work; at the most, Shakespeare's works may fully enter digital existence, living up to and beyond W. B. Worthen's exploration in "Shakespeare 3.0. "3 The future of Shakespeare on film depends on the qualities that digital worlds require: interactivity through participation and procedures, and authence immersion through spatial and encyclopedic environments.4
To put it another way, which screens Shakespeare will inhabit after his lengthy stint on the big one may rely on whether his plays prove suitable for manipulation and immersive...