Forget the iTablet. Hamlet Quartos Online.

Whatever Apple might announce at the Yerba Buena Center today, perhaps more exciting for Shakespeare scholars is the digitization of thirty-two Hamlet quartos. Copies of of the first five editions of the play have been digitized by The Shakespeare Quartos Archive, a joint collaboration between the UK’s JISC and the NEH in the US. The digitized copies, with page turn and zoom functionalities, are housed in libraries including the Folger Library, the British Library, the Bodelian, and the National Library of Scotland. Among the benefits of digitization is the ability to compare differences between editions on opposite sides of the Atlantic.

Other plays are to follow, and with the right app, you could soon be reading Shakespeare’s quartos on that morning commute.

Sam Wood

Sam Wood was born Tokyo, but was raised in the Highlands of Scotland and Montreal. He studied English at the University of Edinburgh. After two years working in the marketing department of a London publishing company, he studied for a PhD at the University of Leeds on Thomas More's Utopia. He has taught literature at the University of Leeds and Manchester Metropolitan University. He currently lives in Paris, where he is working on a book on rootlessness in sixteenth and seventeenth-century England.

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