Article Abstracts
@ the Table of the Great: Hospitable Editing and the Internet Shakespeare Editions Project
Patrick Finn, St. Mary's College, Calgary
Playing with Wench-like Words: Copia and Surplus in the Internet Shakespeare Edition of Cymbeline
Jennifer C. Forsyth, Oregon State University
Dizzying the Arithmetic of Memory: Shakespearean Documents as Text, Image, and Code
Alan Galey, University of Western Ontario
Sonia Massai, King's College London
The Very Large Textual Object: A Prosthetic Reading of Shakespeare
Jonathan Hope and Michael Witmore, Strathclyde University and Carnegie Mellon University.
Gilded monuments and living records: A note on critical editions in print and online
Eric Rasmussen, University of Nevada, Reno
@ the Table of the Great: Hospitable Editing and the Internet Shakespeare Editions Project
Patrick Finn, St. Mary's College, Calgary
By all accounts, early stagings of Shakespeare's plays welcomed patrons from a wide range of the social spectrum. Can we say the same for the printed editions of the plays? Over the past four hundred years publishers, scholars, editors and readers have maintained a debate concerning the dissemination of Shakespeare's works. Questions involving accessibility, usability and presentation remain central to these concerns. That debate has now carried over into the digital realm. This paper takes the position that one way we can create editions that are both accessible and useful is to practice "hospitable editing." Hospitable editing creates editions and/or interfaces that foreground the wellbeing of their guests, thereby ensuring not only that readers and viewers are invited to the table of the great, but that they are given the tools to enjoy themselves while in attendance. As a test case, I will show why I believe the Internet Shakespeare Editions provide a hospitable environment.
Playing with Wench-like Words: Copia and Surplus in the Internet Shakespeare Edition of Cymbeline
Jennifer C. Forsyth, Oregon State University
Editing, typically viewed by non-editors as an unemotional and objective practice, often seems even more mechanical in combination with the stereotypically logical and unfeeling medium of computers. The belief that expressions of emotion are always excessive, carried over from (though it does not originate with) the early modern period, continues to connect personal expression with women and a concomitant lack of authority. Based in part upon my experiences as the editor of Cymbeline for the Internet Shakespeare Editions, I argue that literary studies would benefit from acknowledging the very real emotions editors often feel. Editions which attempt to present definitive notes and commentary by suppressing as many traces of editorial intervention as possible ultimately endorse absolutist claims to knowledge over uncertainty, instability, and plurality. Faced with the overwhelming emphasis in Internet culture on publishing the personal, Internet editions have the opportunity to adapt by combining a dialogic model with the technological advantages of computers, introducing new territories such as fully or partially collaborative editions.
Dizzying the Arithmetic of Memory: Shakespearean Documents as Text, Image, and Code
Alan Galey, University of Western Ontario
This paper takes up the related problems of representing Shakespeare plays accurately and effectively in three very different but interdependent forms: print, reproduced image, and marked-up electronic text. Hamlet's ironic compliment about Laertes, that "to divide him inventorially would dizzy the arithmetic of memory," is oddly applicable to electronic editing as it has developed through the theories and practices of the Internet Shakespeare Editions and many similar projects. The activity of "dividing inventorially" a text into a logical structure of parts that are computable according to a machine-readable "arithmetic" can indeed be a dizzying enterprise. We must restock the toolbox of traditional bibliography if we are to strip the veil of pixels (to paraphrase Fredson Bowers) from electronic texts and understand how they work, not just how they behave on the screen. Looking in particular at the idea of the "encoding crux," along with the seemingly antithetical projects of Charlton Hinman and Teena Rochfort Smith, and the question of when exactly Don John becomes a bastard, this essay explores a vexing question: what is the implicit arithmetic of memory that subtends all reproductions of Shakespearean documents, and how might those texts dizzy our capacity to divide them inventorially?
Redefining the Role of the Editor for the Electronic Medium: A New Internet Shakespeare Edition of Edward III
Sonia Massai, King's College London.
The general aim of the Internet Shakespeare Editions is to 'make scholarly,
fully annotated texts of Shakespeare's plays available in a form native to the
medium of the Internet'. Don McKenzie and Jerome McGann have made editors aware
that the medium through which texts are transmitted affects the way in which
they exist and signify. Instead of simply applying familiar editorial practices
devised to produce printed scholarly editions, electronic editors are therefore
faced by the daunting task of establishing how best to proceed when multiple
versions of the same text can co-exist alongside a potentially endless number
of supplementary materials. In 2000, Susan Hockey complained that there was
no model for electronic editions and that 'most experiments [still] lack[ed]
a framework or structure within which the reader could operate'. This essay
illustrates the working model devised for my Internet Shakespeare Edition of
The Raigne of King Edward III (1596). Examples drawn from Act 3 scene
4 will help me show that the discontinuities between my electronic edition of
Edward III and earlier paper editions are more significant than the continuities.
The Very Large Textual Object: A Prosthetic Reading of Shakespeare
Jonathan Hope and Michael Witmore, Strathclyde University and Carnegie Mellon University.
This paper presents analysis of Shakespeare's texts using a computer program which identifies linguistic forms and charts their dispersal over ranges of sample texts. On the basis of such an analysis, we offer a reading of the F1 genre divisions, suggesting that such historically specific divisions may actually be 'legible' in the 'verbal physiognomy' of the texts. While some might view this work as an attempt to deliver the critical project of analyzing the Shakespearian corpus in the hands of lightning-fast silicon angels, we argue that such an approach is essentially prosthetic, generating striking questions about the nature of reading, genre, and historical interpretation and a materially rich, empirical field in which to answer them.
Gilded monuments and living records: A note on critical editions in print and online
Eric Rasmussen, University of Nevada, Reno
This brief note compares the textual fidelity of the recent Oxford edition of Venus & Adonis with the critical edition available online as part of the Internet Shakespeare Editions project. Interestingly, the electronic edition turns out to be more faithful to Shakespeare's text than is the print edition. The note concludes by drawing an important distinction between critical editions in print and online: should an error be found in an electronic text, it can be corrected in a matter of seconds; whereas errors in print editions will be preserved in perpetuity.
© 2004-,
Matthew Steggle (Editor, EMLS).