Proving yet again what a fabulous tool the iPhone and iPod Touch are for handling media, Shakespeare is a labour of love enabled by the folks behind PlayShakespeare.com. The famous plays themselves are, of course, long since out of copyright and available as free texts for all ebook systems and on the Web. But Shakespeare (the application) does a good job of indexing and packaging the text in a way that makes the master’s plays and poems more accessible than ever.

Intuitively laid out, all Shakepeare’s plays are listed alphabetically, with poems and sonnets also inserted, under ‘p’ and ’s’. Although there’s not much biographical information on the man himself, there’s a hyperlink through to the appropriate
PlayShakespeare biography, which is fair enough. For the bulk of your reading though, it’s into the iPhone-perfect play/chapter selectors and scrolling text windows – the experience is rather sumptuous and all I could really wish for would be some illustrations. But there’s an argument that the text itself is rich enough without polluting it with somebody else’s imaginings.

Drilling down to a specific point in a specific play is trivially easy, but there’s also a very well done Search system. Enter a phrase
and the Shakespeare application takes about six seconds to find all references (using a fuzzy search algorithm, so you don’t even have to get the phrase exactly right) in the Bard’s complete works. Drill down a level and you can step through the text of the appropriate act, one match at a time.

Finally, it’s possible to adjust the size of the main play text in Settings, with seven options, catering from the most eagle-eyed to the most short-sighted. A useful extra is that you can turn on page-turning for a tap in the lower third of the screen. This saves
you having to ‘drag upwards’ all the time and for serious readers is a welcome relief.

If ever a work of literature could benefit from such intensive treatment, it’s ‘The Complete Works of Shakespeare’. The eponymous
iPhone application does it justice.