Studying Shakespeare

Shakespeare quartos online

The Guardian reports that four early editions of Hamlet owned by the Bodleian Library will soon be digitised and will join other quarto copies of the play on a free online resource. The Shakespeare Quartos Archive will in time reproduce at least one copy of every edition of Shakespeare's plays printed in quarto before the Puritans closed the theatres in 1642.

 The site currently has 32 copies of Hamlet, all of which are manipulable. You can annotate the text (keeping your notes private or making them public for others to view), tag lines and even overlay a speech from one edition on top of the same speech from another. An Oxford lecturer, Ben Burton, said he had already used the website with undergraduates to encourage them to think about differences between texts and the way early modern literature is interpreted: they were asked to edit the 'to be or not to be' soliloquy, looking at different versions and making their own decisions. 'Used in this way,' he explained, 'the archive can help enliven a form of textual analysis that many students find dry and esoteric.'


http://www.quartos.org/