Cambridge University Press and developer Agant have teamed up to launch two iPad apps providing an interactive spin on two of Shakespeare's most famous plays: Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet.

Both apps – Romeo and Juliet: Explore Shakespeare and Macbeth: Explore Shakespeare – include the full texts of the plays, along with audio performances, photographs of professional productions, glossary definitions, plot summaries, notes and articles by experts.

They also offer interactive word clouds for individual scenes and characters, diagrams (or "circles") showing the relationships between characters in any given scene, and "themelines" to show how key themes wind their way through the texts.

"These apps are about making Shakespeare accessible for everyone," said Matt Harvey, Cambridge University Press' marketing director, speaking at the apps' launch event in London.

Agant's managing director Dave Addey elaborated on the theme: "The thing we wanted to achieve more than anything else with these apps was to give people a way into the plays, particularly if they hadn't studied Shakespeare before, or found it intimidating."

That doesn't mean dumbing down, though. At the core of both apps is what CUP refers to as "the definitive texts" of the plays, with the interactive features all geared towards helping people understand and enjoy that text, rather than leading them away from it.

"We're very keen that this should be all about the play: the play's the thing!" said John Pettigrew, CUP's digital strategic development manager, who was executive producer for the project. "If the app is taking people away from the play too much, it's not doing the job we want them to do."

Addey said this was one reason video performances weren't included in the apps.

"If you include video, people will watch the video and they won't look at the text: you physically can't watch and read at the same time," he said. "If you have audio playing along with the text, you can study the text and get a better understanding of the words."

Pettigrew said that the apps cost "in the mid five-figures" to develop, with the costs being shared between CUP and Agant. The pair are hoping to launch four more Shakespeare plays over the next 2-3 months, using the engine developed for the first two releases.

Premium pricing

Both apps cost £9.99 on the App Store. Pettigrew said that CUP settled on the price early in the development process, taking heart from the success of similarly-premium book-apps like The Elements, The Magic of Reality and The Waste Land on the App Store.

"It was a deliberate decision to pitch it as a premium app, which gave us a licence to do it properly," said Pettigrew. "It was one of the least contentious issues in the development process. "We knew if we fixed that price, it gave us a target for what we were trying to achieve."

The engine isn't fixed in stone, though. Pettigrew says CUP and Agant will be monitoring feedback and adding new features for the upcoming apps, which will also roll back into Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet. There is also scope to use the engine for CUP's other, non-Shakespeare books.

As part of the development of the first two apps, Cambridge girls' school St Mary's tested them with a group of Year 9 students.

Headmistress Charlotte Avery spoke at the launch event about the experience, saying that her students have been "incredibly positive" about using the apps.

She praised the circles feature, the glossary and the ability to listen to the audio performance in the background while making notes in another application. "For young people to use technology like this, it is another way of basically making Shakespeare cool," said Avery.

"The girls are coming to the end of Act 3 of Romeo and Juliet, and they cannot wait to get back after half-term to continue. They are very excited about this. The apps are innovative and useful, and the students love them."

iPad apps are only part of CUP's digital media strategy, though. "We can do fantastic things here for Shakespeare, but most of our customers don't have iPads, so that can't be the core," said Pettigrew.

"How do we serve the main group of customers? That's where things like the web come in. We have to get the balance right between doing the best thing for a particular platform, and serving all our customers' needs."

For apps, this may require looking beyond iPad. Pettigrew says that Apple's device is the main product being chosen by British schools who are buying tablets for their students to use, but that other countries – Turkey and India, for example – are "going strongly Android".

Addey provided a developer's viewpoint on this, suggesting that for now, "the only platform where people are really paying for higher-value and higher-quality apps is iOS".

This does not mean Agant is not keen to look beyond Apple's platform, if it sees a potential return on its investment in doing so.

"We would happily develop these apps for Android if the market is there. It's an opportunity cost thing: do we develop an app and then port it to Android, or do we develop another app for iPad? That's the choice we're making, and we're hoping in future the choice will be 'both'."

Book-apps innovation

Even so, he was enthusiastic about the experimentation that's going on around book-apps in 2012, as publishers like CUP forge partnerships with app developers.

"We're at the point where the 'right way' to do these things on iPad has not yet been defined. It's a brilliant place to be, because the language and grammar of how these apps work has yet to be defined," said Addey.

"It's like the early days of film, or the invention of things like tracking shots or the reverse dolly zoom. It feels like we're at a similar point with apps. It's still experimental."

Yet Addey stressed that in the Explore Shakespeare apps, this experimentation is geared towards a serious goal: providing people with a way into the plays, whatever their level of knowledge or experience.

"This isn't frivolous: it's not dressing up Shakespeare in some frivolous way. It's true to the text," he said.

"We didn't want to dumb this down, but we wanted to help people get into it on their own terms. These plays really were the mass entertainment of their day: they weren't elitist, it was the man and woman in the street who were enjoying them."