In June 2013, the Royal Shakespeare Company partnered with Google Creative Lab to create its fortieth production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, taking place in real time over the midsummer weekend as a combined digital and live event. Actors performed sections of the play to private, invited and public audiences over a three-day period, while online audiences were invited to engage with a cast of over forty fictional characters with Google+ accounts who blogged, tweeted, shared pictures and video, philosophised and chatted with each other. As Erin Sullivan notes elsewhere in this volume, ‘Stratford is a small town that can at times be difficult to get to’ (above 64), and this production attempted to close the transactional distance between the RSC’s physical and virtual audiences, creating the RSC’s version of the Globe’s ‘meaningful digital experiences that can stand alone from any real-world experience and act as a viable alternative for those who cannot access the physical space’ (Nelson, above 207).

The rationale was not merely to extend Stratford’s audience, however, but to investigate the potential for an entirely new version of Shakespearean engagement designed specifically for the digital sphere. Tom Uglow of Google’s Creative Lab explains: