Backgrounder: Shakespeare Reaches New Heights Online - "There’s magic in the web of it.” Othello Act 3, Scene 4

· In 1996, Dr. Michael Best, a UVic English professor, recognized the emerging power of the internet and created a website to make scholarly, annotated, and visually appealing texts of Shakespeare’s plays freely available. The Internet Shakespeare Editions (ISE) was one of the first sites to incorporate online academic publishing.

· By 2005, the site is recognized around the globe and has been selected for inclusion in the Portal, the British Academy’s directory of online resources in the humanities and social sciences.

· Over seven million pages were downloaded from the current ISE website over the past year. Students, scholars, teachers, actors and directors all over the world use the website on a daily basis. They log in from diverse places such as Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Poland and Saudi Arabia . Between October 18th and the 31st of this year, the website received over 1,100,000 hits.

· The freshly-enhanced site features an elegant new interface with a virtual “library” of Renaissance resources, improved navigation and two new major research tools:

Database of Shakespeare in Performance - a searchable database of performance materials from theatre archives all over North America, and eventually the world. Actors, directors, students, scholars and lovers of Shakespeare will now be able to research images of stage and costume design, key moments in performance, director’s notes, or information about a particular company or actors involved in Shakespeare performance. Already the database contains over 1,000 items, including information on every film based on Shakespeare’s plays.

Illuminated Text - multimedia function that allows students and scholars to research an archive of resources, both old and modern, associated with each play. Starting with Romeo and Juliet and Cymbeline, from modern spelling to the texts as they were originally published, this program will allow the visitor to explore in-depth annotation, related contemporary documents, and illustrations of performance from the 17th to the 21st century.

· The publication of quality multimedia materials on the Web has resulted in a wide variety of partnerships as the site brings together Shakespeare scholars and performers from around the world, theatre companies, and interdisciplinary contributors from computer science, Web design, theatre, and music.

• The website can be fournd at: http://ise.uvic.ca/index.html