The mechanicals, Quince, Snug, Bottom, Flute, Snout and Starveling have arrived to rehearse their play Pyramus and Thisby. “Now, good Peter Quince, call forth your actors by the scroll,” requests Bottom.

Next week that line will echo round the Old Schools Quadrangle at the Bodleian Library as the Globe Theatre stages Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

The Quad will look much the same as it has done for centuries, but behind its venerable walls a technological revolution is taking place, a revolution that very much includes Shakespeare and Quince’s scroll.

“We’re digitising the Shakespearean Quartos from a number of libraries,” Sarah Thomas, Bodley’s Librarian and director of university library services explained.

“As well as the Bodleian, Edinburgh is part of it, and so are the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the Huntington Library in the US. So not only can people who are away from Oxford consult our collections, but they can see them in the company of other related works in a way that has never been possible before.

“It’s not just the Bodleian’s collections, but the collections of the world that are being stitched together through this technology.”

The Quarto Editions are the earliest printed versions of about half of Shakespeare’s plays, including A Midsummer Night’s Dream, first published in 1600. Now immensely valuable books like the Quartos — not to mention documents like Quince’s scroll — can be scanned and radiated out across the world courtesy of the internet.

It’s a project that is very close to Sarah Thomas’s heart.

“It’s the world of the curious. Sometimes it’s someone who stumbles on something by chance — it can be a precocious 11-year-old, or an 88-year-old who has bought their first computer, and is tentatively exploring what he or she can learn.

“The John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera here at the Bodleian springs to mind, for instance. Being able to search through that collection is a delight for all ages. Scholars can mine it for new insights about advertising literature or something like that, while you and I can delight in the images, and the quaint language. It’s all there.”

“You may do it extempore, for it is nothing but roaring,” director Quince tells Snug, who has been cast as the lion in Pyramus and Thisby. But not even the latest internet technology can reveal what directions Shakespeare himself gave to his casts: no records remain.

Isn’t that a shame?

“Oh, terrible, yes!” agreed Clive Hurst, the Bodleian’s head of rare books. “But it leaves room for endless speculation on the part of scholars — and theatre directors.”

Directors like Raz Shaw, who is responsible for the Globe’s Dream.

How does he see the play?

“You want to see it through fresh eyes, yet at the same time be true to the heart of the play,” he told me. “What IS that heart? It's a play about all degrees of love, and where extreme love takes us. It’s also a wonderfully funny play about theatricality.

“In exploring the idea of all that, yet in an outdoor Globe setting, it felt very English. So there's a nod to the 1920/30s Brideshead Revisited sensibilities, with the fairies being more than a nod to the German Weimar cabaret world. That mixture between restraint and free abandon is at the heart of the play and the production.”

So staging the Globe’s production at the Bodleian in 2010 seems to take A Midsummer Night’s Dream on a journey from its origins to the heights of modern technology.

It’s appropriate, therefore, that Bodleian audiences will also be able to see an exhibition of Shakespeare as presented in print through the centuries.

“The display we’re putting on is called ‘Childhood Innocence’,” Clive Hurst explained as he gave me a preview. “Its theme is Shakespeare for children, which is picking up a bit on the popularity of A Midsummer Night’s Dream for children. So we’ve got various versions of the play for them — famously Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare. The earliest is a book called — from Shakespeare, published in London but in French in 1783. So that serves two purposes: it’s teaching them Shakespeare, and it’s teaching them French!”

One book is interactive too — even though it was published long before computer interactivity was invented.

“As passages from Shakespeare were read to a young child, the child could play with the head, moving it from character to character. But, of course, you couldn’t do that with Othello, because he has to have a black head.”

lThe Globe’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is in the Old Schools Quadrangle, Bodleian from Tuesday, July 27 to Sunday, August 8. Tickets 01865 305305 or at oxfordplayhouse.com