A MOST RARE VISION: THE INTERNET SHAKESPEARE EDITIONS

The Internet Shakespeare Editions (ISE) were created in 1996, with the simple, but ambitious, aim of making
scholarly, fully annotated texts of Shakespeare’s plays available in a form native to the medium of the
Internet. The first tasks were to establish both an academic infrastructure and a design for the site as a whole.
The complexity of the process of integrating an advanced academic structure with the new medium was such
that I chose to designate myself the “Coordinating” Editor: one whose job was to provide connections
between the academic and the technical.
To ensure high quality academic input into the Editions, I created an Advisory Board, with
representation from various flavours of Shakespearean editorial traditions, as well as some members whose
expertise was in the area of electronic texts. As with any major editorial project, each major work will be
edited by individual scholars, or teams of scholars in collaboration. On the technical side, there were two
initial considerations: the nature of the tagging of the electronic texts, and the design of the site. I took the risk
of creating a special, simplified tagset for the editions, designed to make the process of tagging sufficiently
uncomplicated that it could be used by a scholar more versed in the intricacies of Shakespeare’s texts than in
the then-standard TEI-SGML. At the same time, the site adhered to the general principles concerning
electronic texts as established by early work in the field by Faulhaber and Schillingsberg. Thus the tagset was
designed in such a way that it could at a later stage be automatically converted to a more standard format, and
indeed ISE-tagged texts can now be converted to well-formed XML by a Perl script. The design of the site
itself was structured to make the most of the expectations of the Internet, while at the same time sending a
clear signal concerning the academic credibility of the refereed materials published. Using the metaphor of a
library, the site was divided into a Foyer for introductory and explanatory materials, the Library itself, where
only fully peer-reviewed materials would be published, and an Annex, where draft texts and other less formal
materials could be published.
The basic academic and design elements are unchanged after seven years, and have stood the test of
experience. There have been, however, some significant developments. The ISE now has a General Textual
Editor, a distinguished young editor, Eric Rasmussen, who is also involved in the highly demanding, part
electronic New Variorum edition of Hamlet. All Shakespeare’s plays are now transcribed as initially printed;
several plays are represented by more than one text, since they were initially published in one or more
Quartos before the appearance of the First Folio (1623). The range of texts has also been expanded to include
six plays first published in the Third Folio of 1663, wrongly attributed to Shakespeare. It has also become
clear that an important service that can be supplied by a site like the ISE is the publication of reference works
that are no longer in print. John Velz’s important Shakespeare and the Classical Tradition (originally
published in 1968) is now published on the site in a graphic facsimile, thanks to his generosity in making it
available. A further significant addition is the major reference work on Shakespeare and film by Kenneth
Rothwell. Again, the author has made his work available; in this instance, the text has been rescued from
ancient 5 1/4 inch floppy disks, and is in the process of being transformed into database format to permit rapid
searches and regular updates.
It is clear that the future direction of the ISE will involve a more general movement towards the use
of relational database structures in other areas. The site has recently acquired permission to link images of the
complete Folios 1–4 to the transcribed texts; to do this we are developing a database structure based on the
transcribed XML texts.
The most important further development of the site will be in the area of performance. One of the
much-vaunted capacities of the electronic text is its capacity to link to “texts” of a different kind: graphics,
sound, and video. Shakespeare is a perfect vehicle for experimentation in this area, since his plays are filmed
and performed with such frequency that a whole discipline of criticism depends on discussing his plays in
performance. One of the great challenges in developing a performance database of this kind is copyright. For
copyright reasons, it is unlikely that much material from popular films will be accessible; the “workaround” is
to turn to the remarkably rich source of staging documents of various kinds created by the inventive and
creative work of the many professional companies that perform Shakespeare around North America,
especially in open-air forums. A parallel challenge is to create a data model that will reveal patterns within the
materials as they are added, and allow for both simple and advanced searches by students, scholars, and
actors. This section of the ISE has the potential to become a major research tool in its own right, and will in
due course require that a further specialist editor be appointed to oversee the process of ensuring quality in the
kinds of materials stored in the database. A dedicated section of the site, the Theater, will lodge the
performance database.
The ISE is pleased to be contributing both its texts and images to the developing Text Analysis Portal
for Research, at present under development by a consortium of six universities in Canada. Together with our
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sister institutions, we look forward to enhancing the kinds of readings we can offer visitors to the site. As we
work towards integrating multimedia texts with encoded transcriptions and modern, annotated editions, the
design of sensitive and inclusive metadata, of the kind under development in TAPoR by the team at the
University of New Brunswick will be central, as will the expertise of Ian Lancashire’s group at the University
of Toronto, as further tools for the online analysis of texts, along the lines of TACT and PatterWeb, are
developed.