Sound and Fury of HyperMacbeth
29 May 2002

A new treatment of Macbeth on the Internet probably won't impress Shakespeare purists. In fact, codpieces, ghosts and daggers are unmistakably absent from HyperMacbeth, the latest Net artwork by Italian new media artist dlsan.

In an attempt to "render Macbeth into a new medium," in the spirit of experimentation and by way of tribute to the Bard, dlsan's HyperMacbeth combines looping electronic music and garish graphic strips with dislocated mouthfuls of text from Shakespeare's play. Adding insult to injury for those who like their Shakespeare as close to the original as possible, dlsan not only hacks Shakespeare's hallowed speeches into pieces, but presents them simultaneously on the screen in Italian and English.

Unlike the original play, which follows a relentless path from Macbeth's encounter with the witches to his blatant disregard for their prophesies, HyperMacbeth is somewhat less predictable. As the user navigates through a selection of the play's speeches by clicking on hyperlinks, random combinations of graphics, text and music invade the screen. Clicking on the line, "The queen, my lord, is dead," carries the audience in any number of directions, from a capitalized "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow," stark against a flashing purple background, to the Italian equivalent, "Domani, e domani, e domani," enveloped in a throbbing sound-scape and flickering crimson graphics.

Although the use of hypertext and graphics is quite basic, the effect is very busy -- a screen cluttered with undulating shards of text, colors and music. "It is full of 'sound and fury,'" said Laurie Osborne, an associate professor of English at Colby College, Maine, who specializes in Hypertext Shakespeare. "But I suspect that 'signifying nothing' is not quite what is going on."

The "sound and fury" is the artist's way of capturing something of the experience of going to the theater. "In theater, every performance is different. People may know the text and the story, and maybe the actors and director, but they don't know how the performers will act," said dlsan, who goes by the automatically generated nickname ascribed to him by his first Internet provider in 1998. "I've tried to recreate this experience with the combination of colors, images, text and music."

There are vast numbers of websites devoted to Shakespeare's work -- typing his name into Google's search engine retrieves more than three million entries -- but dlsan's HyperMacbeth doesn't fit the typical format of such annotated hypertextual editions as Mr. William Shakespeare and the Internet, and Shakespeare Online.

In fact, HyperMacbeth works as a kind of pastiche on the conventions of annotating Shakespeare on the Web. Whereas in scholarly Internet editions of The Complete Works, following a link will lead the reader to an explanation of an obscure Elizabethan word, dlsan's hyperlinks might change the shape, size and color of a phrase, lead your eye to a new line in another part of the screen or morph into a completely new speech.

"HyperMacbeth looks at Shakespeare's text as a form of remixable poetry," said Christiane Paul, curator of new media arts at the Whitney Museum in New York. "The use of hypertext turns out to be very effective due to the power and beauty of Shakespeare's language, which can stand on its own even if it is broken up into sentence fragments."

From William Hogarth to John Singer Sargent, Shakespeare has inspired visual artists for centuries. The tradition has continued into the Internet era. Web-based works such as Andy Deck's bardcode, which translates lines from Shakespeare's plays into the black and white vertical barcode stripes, and the Quicktime version of Hamlet at Computerfinearts.com, recontextualize Shakespeare for today's audiences. For dlsan, representing heavy, unbroken speeches from Macbeth in the Web format was too risky -- fragmentation seemed like the best way to create a sense of drama in the Internet medium.

"Internet users are a disenchanted and knowing public," said dlsan. "I've tried to reflect that in my approach to Macbeth."

Copyright Wired Digital Inc.