Titania, queen of the fairies, makes her entrance in comic disarray, pink polka-dot dress and pearl necklace clashing fiercely with the back-turned baseball cap and rakish mustache adorning her plastic head. The foot-lights flash on as David Small places her on the hand-sized stage he has built from LEGO bricks. But the figurine and the stage are merely the control system for the real show, which is taking place on a nearby computer monitor. They are the Nintendo joystick for a project called Virtual Shakespeare, Small's effort to present the playwright's complete dramatic texts in a form that can be easily and intuitively navigated. Small, a doctoral candidate in the Aesthetics and Computation Group at MIT's Media Laboratory, sees Virtual Shakespeare as a step toward a system for displaying any large body of text with new clarity of structure, regardless of the subject matter. In fact, he has produced a similar electronic version of the Bible, and is now adapting some of the extensive body of Jewish sacred writings.

As Small begins his guided tour of Shakespeare, the monitor is displaying the full text of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Columns of type, each encompassing an entire scene, appear to dangle in space like ghostly streamers. Enter Titania, one of a collection of Shakespearean characters improvised from LEGO figurines. Resistors embedded in her feet identify her to the computer, and all her lines of dialogue suddenly light up on the computer screen. Small decides to head for one of these luminous bands, spinning a pair of wheels mounted on the stage to travel down and across the columns to a lengthy speech. He presses a button at the side of the stage to zoom in close enough to read. When he turns the stage counterclockwise, the plane of view rotates to display an otherwise hidden footnote concerning Titania.