This week, the Shakespeare Quartos Archive has lined up a real treat for Shakespeare enthusiasts. They have collated all 32 surviving quarto editions of Hamlet in a free online archive.
This new venture enables you to compare Hamlet online and annotate high-quality page reproductions without the need to source copies from the greatest libraries around the world.
I think that this venture, led by the Bodleian Library in Oxford and the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC, is a fantastic new resource in the arsenal of Shakespeare scholarship. Access to original manuscripts is often perceived as near impossible - that barrier has now been removed.
I hope that the accessibility that this new project affords will inspire a new generation of Shakespeare scholars and inspire new studies of Hamlet.
Photo © British Library
Comments
Hi! Can you please specify the corresponding years of such editions? In other sites the term seems to be indistinctly referred to as “copies”. Thank you much.