Shakespeare: First Folio to go online

[John F]

An Effort to Put First Edition of Shakespeare Online
By ROBIN POGREBIN

A campaign is under way to digitize and make available online the first collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays, known as the First Folio.

A cadre of celebrities – including the actors Vanessa Redgrave and Stephen Fry and the theater director Peter Hall – are championing the fund-raising effort by the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford, “Sprint for Shakespeare,” which started this week. The campaign aims to raise £20,000 (about $31,000) through private contributions.

Once online, the folio will be available free, accompanied by articles and blogs from academics, other specialists, theater professionals and the public.

While copies of the book are not uncommon, the Bodleian’s First Folio is rare because it has not been rebound or restored in the almost four centuries since it first entered the library late in 1623. Its marks reveal the tastes of early readers; the pages of “Romeo and Juliet” are worn almost to shreds, while “King John” is virtually pristine. The volume, which was apparently sold by the library in the 1660’s, returned after a public fund-raising campaign at the turn of the 20th century to buy it from the family that owned it.

Oxford will be marking the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death in 2016.

“The Shakespeare First Folio is the most important secular book in the history of the western world,” said Jonathan Bate, a Shakespeare scholar at Oxford. “The digitization of the Bodleian copy, with its strange and eventful history, is a great project.”

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/ ... re-online/

I thought this surely must have been done already. It ought to be, and I'm glad there are plans to do it. But the plans are misconceived. Oxford's copy of the Folio does not contain the best state of every page; no copy does. The printer read proof of each page after printing one or more copies and made some unsystematic corrections, but the pages with the uncorrected typos were nonetheless included in the copies for sale, bound and unbound. What you get in any one copy is a crap shoot.

In 1968, when I was working at W. W. Norton, they published a facsimile of the First Folio collated from many copies by Shakespeare textual expert Charlton Hinman to provide the corrected and most clearly printed version of every page - the best copy of the Folio that has ever existed. It was revised in 1996 to replace Hinman's introduction, which had become dated, but the actual text of the Folio remains the same. This is what should be online, not the Bodleian's single copy which is textually inferior and moreover partly in poor condition.

The Norton Folio is still in print, according to amazon.com, at a list price of $195 (amazon's price is $122.85). Norton is obviously committed to keeping its Folio in print, despite inevitably low sales, or they wouldn't have commissioned a new introduction. Putting the Folio online in any version is likely to harm sales, but it's going to happen - and there are already other First Folio facsimiles in print at much lower prices, making Norton's a specialized product. So Norton might be persuaded to grant permission to use its edition, thereby providing Shakespeare scholars all over the world with the best. I don't know.

But this isn't a disinterested scholarly project. It's to be done by a particular library, the Bodleian of the University of Oxford, highlighting its own copy. If the Bodleian also includes an errata list, detailing which of its readings and pages are not the best and what the best readings are, that would make their Folio usable by serious scholars who don't own the Norton and presumably can't afford it. Otherwise, I'd say Oxford's project is flawed, parochial, and self-celebratory, does Shakespeare something of an injustice, and the sooner it's superseded by a proper online facsimile the better.

[jbuck919]

I was getting a bad odor from this and then I started reading after the link. I said "Oh someone also thinks something is amiss" and only after two sentences did I realize that John F was adding his own (excellent) commentary.

Oxford will be marking the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death in 2016.

Yes, and so will the rest of the world, but Shakespeare never went to university, and even Christopher Marlowe was a Cambridge man. (The other thing that seems odd is that they're making a fuss about raising a measly 20,000 pounds; if it's worth doing, why does such an amount require famous people soliciting private contributions at all?)