In an ordinary room off a beige corridor in a dull 1930s Oxford building, four priceless early editions of Hamlet lie thrillingly open on a large round table that once belonged to 19th century art critic and social thinker John Ruskin.
It’s hugely tempting to touch, but this is a situation where discretion is the better part of valor.
These are the Bodleian Library’s quarto copies (a cheap way of printing on paper that was then folded in four) of the Danish prince’s very “Tragicall Historie,” printed between 1611 and 1637. They spend most of their lives locked away in the darkness of the New Bodleian Library’s vaults, under the watchful eye of Clive Hurst, the library’s director of rare books.
“We’ll gladly make them accessible if people have a good reason,” Hurst says. “But even serious Shakespeare scholars rarely ask to look at the primary sources — they tend to stick to the Arden Shakespeare.”
The Arden may be the accepted premier scholarly edition to which academics, students and actors most frequently refer, but a new online database is set to make it easier for anyone interested in Shakespeare to compare and contrast the earliest editions of his plays that still exist.
Even if you’re in receipt of a generous grant that allows you to fly all over the world to view individual quartos in the flesh, Hurst says, libraries guard their precious copies jealously. A new Web site offers the first opportunity anyone has ever had to compare different editions side by side.
Funded by the UK Joint Information Systems Committee and the US National Endowment for the Humanities, the Shakespeare Quartos Archive (www.quartos.org) is a free resource that will in time reproduce at least one copy of every edition of Shakespeare’s plays printed in quarto before the theatres were closed by the Puritan parliament in 1642.
Currently, there are 32 copies of Hamlet available to view — all contributed by the project’s partner institutions, which own the majority of pre-1642 quartos: the Bodleian, the British Library, the University of Edinburgh Library, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Huntingdon Library and the National Library of Scotland.
The Web site offers far more than just a photographic reproduction of these rare texts. Academics were invited on to an advisory forum to suggest features they felt would be most useful, explains Pip Willcox, digital editor of the Oxford Digital Library, who has edited the plays so that the trickier composition of these early versions is clarified in a transcribed version that can be viewed alongside each page.
As a condition of the project’s funding, and unusually in academia, the Web site, built by the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, is open access.
Features that would be impossible to replicate even by traipsing off to university libraries all over the world include the facility to overlay a speech from one edition on top of the same speech from another.
For Christie Carson, senior lecturer in English at Royal Holloway, the ease of comparison is invaluable in thinking about what differences between texts mean in terms of performance history.
“Hamlet is an interesting example because the placement of ‘to be or not to be’ is crucial to the development of Hamlet’s character,” she says. “Productions today still have to make choices about where to place the speech and whether to include the final soliloquy, ‘How all occasions do inform against me.’ The recent Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) production starring David Tennant made some very interesting choices in this category.”
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