Past is prologue: Electronic New Variorum Shakespeares

Abstract

This paper briefly reviews the history of the transformation of the New Variorum edition of The Winter's Tale (WT) into an electronic edition. Then it turns to the beautifully successful interface designed by Alan Galey to exploit the XML tagging of WT by Julia Flanders. It ends with a look at the advantages (chiefly increased accuracy) and disadvantages (chiefly the instability over time of TEI and XML, which are under constant revision) of the transformation of the book edition to the electronic medium.

Keywords:

• Variorum
• Shakespeare
• interface

Notes

1. My narrative elides a crucial incident in the development of an electronic NVS, namely the involvement of Professor Gregory Crane of Tufts University, the classicist editor-in-chief of the Perseus Project and a pioneer in humanities computing at Harvard in the 1980s. After initially volunteering his expertise to MLA, Crane conclusively demonstrated that it would be possible to have an electronic Variorum by creating an electronic text of an already published volume, encoding it in detail in Standard General Markup Language (SGML) to conform to the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), the standard for encoding texts in the humanities – a huge amount of work. It is quite impossible to overstate how much the New Variorum Shakespeare remains in Greg Crane's debt. For a very early vision of what an electronic NVS might be, see Brockbank.

2. All images of the eNVS interface included here are from an unpublished prototype, and do not necessarily represent the eNVS interface or content as it will appear upon publication.