'Can this cockpit hold the vasty fields of France?" Shakespeare wondered in his play "Henry V." "Or may we cram within this wooden O the very casques that did affright the air at Agincourt?" Since the curtain rose this month on a new Web site that puts all of Shakespeare's plays at our fingertips, those lines might need tweaking.
"Can this laptop hold the vasty fields of France?" we will ask. "Or may we cram within this plastic phone" not just the helmets of Agincourt, but Hamlet's ghost-haunted castle, Cleopatra's barge and Portia's watery Venice? All that and much more, it seems, thanks to the incessantly innovating search engine Google.
The "cockpit" and the "wooden O" are of course poetic turns of phrase for the circular or octagonal Globe Theater in London where Shakespeare's players strutted and fretted their hour upon the stage four centuries ago. And the question at issue -- though Shakespeare was surely never in doubt -- was whether a small, bare platform could somehow be made to accommodate a great battle or a thousand other teeming scenes.