Afterword
The history of the publication of Shakespeare’s work is - and will probably always be - a history in the making. As we finish editing this exhibition, new editions of individual plays are reaching the market and others are in preparation. Revised editions of the complete works will certainly be published in the years to come and will almost certainly aim at incorporating new insights and perspectives brought to light by research and scholarly work.
Technology has played a significant role in making the collection of Shakespeare’s writing available to a wider readership. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) published the web’s first edition of the Complete Works of William Shakespeare in 1993. In 1996, Shakespeare’s plays and poems started being gradually published as The Internet Shakespeare Editions (ISE), a scholarly website supported by the University of Victoria, the Friends of the ISE, and the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. The Folger Shakespeare Library, in Washington, DC, has now also made the full-text of all of Shakespeare’s works freely available to read and download.
Moreover, as Prof David Crystal points out, online editions provide further new opportunities to engage with Shakespeare’s works that go far beyond the sole presentation of the text as search facilities and ‘all sorts of add-ons give a kind of illumination not possible in traditional editions’. For instance, Crystal & Crystal’s Shakespeare’s Words website includes a searchable glossary, a thesaurus, word families, modern pronunciation, Original Pronunciation (OP), and a page of scene-by-scene casting. Crystal believes that ‘the crucial thing is that all features are hyperlinked to the lines in the text, so people can switch back and forth easily’
Behind such online editions there is the work of numerous editors who had to make crucial decisions on the final texts and faced some the challenges also encountered by the editors of the major printed editions highlighted in this exhibition. Moreover, as we enter the fifth century of the existence of the First Folio, the rapid development of AI technology is very likely to have an impact on Shakespearean scholars and editors by posing new challenges and even altering their roles.
Samuel Johnson, in the preface to his edition of Shakespeare’s works, emphasized the importance of approaching Shakespeare with humility, respect, and a keen appreciation for the unique qualities of his language and composition. From Heminges and Condell to Wells, Bate, Greenblatt, and so many others, editors have taken the task of making the Shakespeare accessible to following generations of readers. This exhibition is a humble bow to them and an attempt to make their work better known to a general readership and to a new generation of students.
Christina Wolf, SFHEA