3/26/2008

Shakespeare goes digital

Filed under: — Aviran Mordo @ 6:48 pm

A U.S. and British library plan to reproduce online all 75 editions of William Shakespeare’s plays printed in the quarto format before the year 1641.

The Bodleian Library in Oxford and Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC have joined forces to download their collections, building on the work of the British Library which digitized its collection of quarto editions in 2004.

“There are no surviving manuscripts of Shakespeare’s plays in his handwriting so the quartos are the closest we can get to what Shakespeare really wanted,” said Bodleian spokeswoman Oana Romocea.

“Some quartos do, however, have his annotations around the printed text.”

The project is designed to make all of the earliest printed versions of Shakespeare’s plays, many of which are only accessible to scholars, available to the wider public.

 

Leave a Reply

You must have Javascript enabled in order to submit comments.

All fields are optional (except comment).
Some comments may be held for moderation (depends on spam filter) and not show up immediately.
Links will automatically get rel="nofollow" attribute to deter spammers.

Powered by WordPress