Shakespeare’s quartos to be put online

26 Mar 2008 | 18:55 GMT

By Sylvie Barak

ALL THE WEB'S a stage and every bard has his site. Or at least, he will when the Bodleian Library in Oxford and Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC are through with him.

The libraries are collaborating to put all 75 editions of William Shakespeare's plays from before the year 1641, in the quarto format, online.

The project, which is designed to make all the quartos available to the general public will build on the work already done by the British Library which digitised its collection of the Bard’s quarto editions in 2004. Previously the quartos, which are the earliest printed editions of Shakespeare’s work, were only really accessible to scholars. They are believed to be the closest one can get to what Shakespeare himself might actually have written, and what probably appeared on the early modern English stage.

Once the one year project is complete, Shakespeare buffs will be able to compare quartos side-by-side, layer them one on top of the other, search them and even digitally tag them.

As well as allowing people to discern even very minor differences between replicas of the same quarto, the digital database will also make it easier for boffins to examine the sometimes significant inconsistencies between quartos, including some of Shakespeare's most famous quotes.

And hence, “Let every eye negotiate for itself”. µ

L’Inq
Reuters

Inq Factoid Shakespeare lived just down the road from Andrew Thomas and drank in many of the same pubs, although it's not clear if they ever actually met.

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