Tennant, it seems, did not make the trip to see the quartos in the original to come to his own conclusions. Maybe next time, he can have a quick squint at Hamlet’s speeches on the Web site. If he’s in a particularly studious mood, of course, Tennant might mark and tag chunks of the text of his speeches with his own annotations.
“You can keep your annotations private, or make them public,” Willcox says.
Ben Burton, outside lecturer in Shakespeare and Renaissance literature at Hertford College and Somerville colleges, Oxford, says he’s already used the Web site to encourage students to think about how differences between texts affect the way early modern literature is interpreted.
The students were set the task of editing the “to be or not to be” soliloquy. Looking at the differing versions, they were told to make their own decisions as to what punctuation should be used and comment on the discrepancies they found.
“The archive is ideally suited to this exercise, as it makes it easy for them to identify and examine the variations. Used in this way, the archive can help enliven a form of textual analysis that many students find dry and esoteric,” he says.
Having recently visited six libraries in the UK and US to examine six of the seven surviving second quarto editions of Hamlet — the last one is in Poland and he’s not made it over there yet — Gabriel Egan, reader in Shakespeare studies at Loughborough University and author of Reading Shakespeare’s Mind, says the fact that early copies are so spread out is a cause of academic arguments.
“I’m interested in the small differences between the copies of a single edition arising because printers would stop the press during a run, make corrections to the type, restart the press and then mix the corrected with the uncorrected sheets,” he says.
“In the case of the second quarto of Hamlet, the 2007 Arden Shakespeare reports that scholars don’t even agree what all the differences between the seven exemplars are. A couple of scholars reckon they’ve found a press correction in the Yale exemplar, but the Arden editors weren’t able to confirm this. It’s surprising that the state of the text of the first good edition of the most famous work of English literature should be the subject of uncertainty, but there it is.”
As a member of the project’s advisory forum, Egan says that his central concern was that the archive should not just be freely available, but also manipulable by users.
“Those who make a resource — Google Maps, or the Shakespeare quartos archive, for instance — must be aware that they themselves won’t be able to think up the most exciting new uses for it, so they must provide a way for others to suck in the data over the Internet and synthesize it,” he says.
What are the next quarto versions set for upload to the archive? Willcox says her first choice would be Romeo and Juliet, and Hurst nominates King Lear. Maybe they should wait to see David Tennant’s next choice of Shakespeare role, select the play based on that and invite him to the launch: There surely couldn’t be a better way to publicize — and popularize — a Web site.
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