Shakespeare, you imagine, would have killed for access to a decent word processor and the ability to delete, revise, improve, and expand on screen rather than the tedious process of scratching the words with a pen. He was the consummate professional writer: he wrote to earn a living, and would have embraced anything that made the task easier.But how would he have greeted his works appearing on CD-ROM? On the face of it, a good idea. Certainly, if you want to undertake some serious academic study of text, then here you can look at the frequency of word use, search for phrases and specific lines, etc. It's a useful tool for serious students of the bard to keep on the shelf.
But as a slim means of reading the complete works? Well, all the words are here. And that's the major flaw. You pick a play, you call it up, and there they are - naked words on a vast snow white screen. They scroll on and on, endlessly. No notes, no textual analysis, no commentary. If you're staging the play and want to print out some A4 pages of text for your cast and crew, fine. But, for the student or fan or casual reader, the text appears depressingly bland on screen.
Books have a tactile quality which simply doesn't translate to a keyboard and mouse. Books have commentaries and pictures. You get no audio-visual extras or stimulus here. Just words. And they do look incredibly boring on screen. They also look so outmoded. The language is Elizabethan, but the technology seems to be from an equally ancient era - simple words, with no visual content, no audio supplement, no interactive ability to dissect meaning or search for dramatic analysis. It's quite disappointing, really.
This could be an interesting little resource, very useful for a specialist market, but it's highly unsatisfactory as a student or family edition of 'the complete works'.
