ABSTRACT
It will come as no surprise to anyone who has been watching the cultural recuperation of Shakespeare since the coming of film and television to witness the apparition of “digital Shakespeares.”1 This “post-cinema Shakespeare”2
has appeared on the Internet and on CD-ROM, but those digital productions are often perceived as derivative commodities or simply unelaborated efforts characteristic of the cultural moment in which we live. However, as this chapter would like to show, digital adaptations of Macbeth are fascinating productions that actualize visually the very cognitive mechanisms readers of Macbeth perform when they read the play. Digital adaptations would stage the very processes our modular minds go through when we read Macbeth, and the study of such processes prompted by digital artworks allows us to gain insight into the analogous mechanisms that take place in our embodied minds. Combining touch, sight, and hearing, digital transformations of Macbeth refashion the way in which we understand information processing and the manner in which we assimilate Shakespeare. Even though some may argue that we have always read “hypertextually,” one of digital technologies’ major contributions would be to make apparent the cognitive mechanisms and performances that were neglected in the last decades, returning us to hearing, reading, and viewing positions that relate to oral poetry, stage performance, codex, and film.
