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.
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.
The project is designed to make all of the quartos, many of which are only accessible to scholars, available to the wider public.
The process of downloading the quartos will begin next month and take a year to complete.
Online visitors will be able to compare images side-by-side, lay one facsimile on top of the other, search plays and mark and tag the texts.
Read the Entire Story…
Source: Reuters via Yahoo! News
|
|
|
