27 Mar 08

Oxford’s Bodleian Library, together with the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC, is to create the Shakespeare Quartos Archive, a freely-accessible digital collection.

The one-year project, which begins in April 2008, will reunite all seventy-five pre-1641 quarto editions of Shakespeare’s plays into a single online collection.

In the absence of surviving manuscripts, the quartos – Shakespeare’s earliest printed editions – offer the closest known evidence of what Shakespeare might actually have written, and what appeared on the early modern English stage. They are of immense interest to scholars, teachers, editors, and theatre directors, yet due to their rarity and fragility, the earliest quartos are not readily available for most to study.

The Shakespeare Quartos Archive will make these earliest quartos freely accessible for in-depth study to Shakespeare students across the globe.
The project’s website will feature high-resolution reproductions and the full text of surviving Shakespeare quartos in an interactive interface. Users will be able to overlay text images, compare images side-by-side, search the full text, and mark and tag text images with their own annotations.

These online functions will facilitate scholarly research, performance studies, and new pedagogical applications. In the first instance, this full functionality will apply to all 32 copies of Hamlet, which are held at participating institutions.

The initiative is one of five transatlantic digitisation collaborations between British and American institutions that were awarded special collaboration grants. 

The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) is supporting the project through funding of almost £60,000 for the British participating organizations. The US partners will receive their funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).

The other participating organizations in the Shakespeare project include the British Library, Edinburgh University Library, the National Library of Scotland, the Shakespeare Institute at Birmingham University and the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities. 

Richard Ovenden, Associate Director and Keeper of Special Collections, Bodleian Library said: ‘The Bodleian Library is committed to making its collections and treasures available to the world-wide community of scholars, teachers, and students. Thanks to the support of JISC and the NEH, the Shakespeare Quartos Archive will help us move a step closer to realizing this goal. Working with the Folger Shakespeare Library and our other partners, we will create a significant online resource for scholars at all levels with an interest in Shakespeare.’

Dr Malcolm Read, JISC Executive Secretary, said: ‘This project demonstrates the great potential of collaboration between our two countries in the field of digitisation. It brings together skills, expertise and important scholarly content in ways that we hope and trust will deliver major benefits to scholars on both sides of the Atlantic. We are delighted to be working with the NEH on this digitisation initiative and we look forward to seeing the fruits of this project in due course.’