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.

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