The INQ: less you forget
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Shakespeare’s quartos to be put online
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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Now, I had heard from someone I shan't name, (but his initials are MM), who was present himself, that Billy got the inspiration for most of his more inebriated characters from observing Andrew in the pub. Oh, and for Yorick, as well.
Sound and Fury_ (the untaming of a shrew)
A little known fact, possibly pertaining to Andrew Thomas, is that the voices at the end of "I Am The Walrus" come from a BBC airing of "King Lear"...

Fiona:
"A pestilence on her for a mad rogue! 'a pour'd a flagon of Rhenish on me head once. This same skull, sir, was, ex-Lady
Heather's skull, the Queen's jesterette."

Paul:
"Alas, poor Heather! I knew her, Fiona, a bird of infinite joist, a scheming fantasist of most excellent fancy. She hath bore me on her foot a thousand times, and now how abhorr'd in my imagination it is!"

John: 
"We haven't got a script yet. But we've got a bloke going 'round the lavatories of Britain, cribbing all the notes off the walls."

Porthos:
"All for £25m."

Athos:
"And £25m for all."

Quartos:
I don't get it!?