The Internet Shakespeare Editions: Scholarly Shakespeare on the Web

Abstract

The Internet Shakespeare Editions (ISE) were founded in 1996, with a mission to make Shakespeare's works freely available in scholarly, multimedia, Internet editions. This article discusses the three main areas in which the ISE publishes: the texts themselves, records of performance and the context of Shakespeare's life and the social and intellectual climate of the time. Both opportunities and challenges are presented by the new medium: the encyclopaedic depth of data means that there is a need for intuitive signals to permit navigation between text, facsimile, annotation and performance; there is a need for data structures that will not render scholarly work obsolete over time; there is an opportunity to record some of the variety of Shakespeare on stage and film, but there are difficulties in dealing with issues of copyright. In the future, the site will become more interactive as, for example, visitors will be able to record reviews of current productions of the plays.

Keywords:

• Shakespeare
• Internet
• multimedia
• navigation
• databases
• XML
• variant readings

Notes

1. Traffic to the ISE site has increased by about 25% in the last year; visitors in May of 2007, for example, came from 151 countries, ranging from over a quarter of a million from the “.com” domain (the preferred domain for commercial providers of Internet service for many home users), where country cannot be determined, to a single request from Christmas Island.

2. In a later article in this special issue, Peter Holland discusses a similar problem faced by commercial publishers in the early days of the Web. See also Siemens et al.

3. See the detailed discussion of this evolution of the electronic medium in the essay in this special issue by Christie Carson.

4. See the two special issues of Early Modern Literary Studies focusing on the Internet Shakespeare Editions (Best, “The Internet Shakespeare”; Best and Rasmussen).

5. The site also includes transcriptions of the six additional apocryphal plays first published in the Third Folio of 1664, and will publish additional, non-Shakespearean plays prepared by the project on Shakespeare and the Queen's Men at McMaster and Toronto Universities.

6. Ian Lancashire and Ray Siemens have explored the concept of the dynamic text extensively; see Lancashire, “The Dynamic Text” and “The Public-domain Shakespeare”; Siemens, “Disparate Structures” and “Shakespearean Apparatus?”.

7. For more on the ISE system of encoding, see my article “A Most Rare Vision”. For those interested in the technical infrastructure of the ISE site, see <http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Foyer/techinfo.html>. The site is a linked set of Web applications, all of which use open source software.

8. Randal McLeod makes a fine case for richness rather than instability in the multiplicities of the early texts.

9. I discuss the possibility of restoring the “semantic field” of meaning lost in modernization of old, ambiguous spelling, by animated text in two articles (Best, “Standing” and “Forswearing”). Just how to use the medium to figure textual variation will be an area of experiment and exploration as ISE texts become more fully mature.

10. See my chapter “A Marvellous Convenient Place” for a discussion of the value, and the challenges, in employing student programmers.