The Shakespeare Quartos Archive

The Shakespeare Quartos Archive is a transatlantic collection of editions of Shakespeare's plays from before 1642. The archive is comprised of two main sections: the Hamlet prototype and the British Library's Shakespeare in Quarto site. The first offers "full cover-to-cover digital reproductions and transcriptions of thirty-two copies of the five earliest editions of the play Hamlet. You can view quartos separately, or alongside any number of copies. You can search annotate, make public or private sets of annotations, create exhibits or character cue line lists, and download and print text and images." This functionality seems to embody many of the virtues McGann identifies in digital archives. The texts are searchable and can be compared side by side in facsimile. The site itself, however, is not as fully fleshed-out as it could be in order to really take advantage of the potential it holds. It announces plans to add "full functionality" for all of Shakespeare's quarto plays, but the site began in 2008, and Hamlet remains the only text represented. The Shakespeare in Quarto site, which is credited as a predecessor project, is under the auspices of the British Library and seems to be joined to the Quartos Archive but does not seem fully a part of it (I would say that it is really a part of the British Library site). The Quartos Archive says, "The Shakespeare Quartos Archive expands the British Library's 'Shakespeare in Quarto' website into an online collection reproducing at least one copy of every edition of William Shakespeare's plays printed in quarto before the theatres closed in 1642." Thus, one must access both sites to have access to the breadth of what the archive claims. This access, however, adds the ability to compare facsimiles of 107 quartos (not all of the same play, and only two at a time).

The British Library site offers more textual information and references and background, but it is not searchable in the way that the Archive is; it is based on the facsimile, and missing the other elements of digital archives. Other site, such as the Folger Digital Texts of Shakespeare's plays, are based solely on the words themselves, containing high searchability within the text but without facsimiles or the ability to search between editions of a particular text (they instead create their own text rather than provide access to textual variation).