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Shakespeare on Stage
American Shakespeare Center, Return to the Forbidden Planet. To Dec. 1, 2013.
Folger Shakespeare Library, Twelfth Night. To Jun. 9, 2013.
American Shakespeare Center, Love's Labour's Lost. To Jun. 15, 2013.
American Shakespeare Center, Twelfth Night. To Jun. 16, 2013.
American Shakespeare Center, The Duchess of Malfi. To Jun. 15, 2013.
More Performances…
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5. Supporting Materials

5.1. General

A traditional introduction does not normally exceed 18,000 words, including the discussion of the text, the stage history, and a critical discussion of the play. The Internet Editions will break this structure into its component parts; while there will not be the same constraint on space a printed edition demands, editors should make every attempt to make their material accessible and compact. Few readers will read extensive material on the screen; thus you must make it easy for readers to find the material that they are searching for, and if you are to persuade them to download and print out your work for more leisurely consultation you will have to adopt some of the more respectable strategies of the journalist, such as the "hook" that rouses interest, and a clarity of style to keep your readers interested.

5.1.1. Hypertext again

There are at least two ways of using the hypertext structure of the Internet to make your critical and historical materials readily accessible to your readers.

  1. From an initial table of contents, break your material up into logical sections, each of which is of modest length. Thus you can construct a linear argument, each logical "page" leading to the next, but readers can branch directly to the specific subject that interests them if they so desire. An example might be in a stage history divided into general periods (Renaissance, Restoration, eighteenth-century, Romantic, and so on), where one reader might choose to look only at one period, and another might look at them all. It will be possible to make the whole essay available in a linear format on the site, as well its logical sections, if you would prefer to retain this option.
  2. Write a single, compact essay, with branches to additional material. Thus in your survey of criticism you might wish to choose three or four especially significant critics, representative of their times; the body of the essay would provide a summary, with detailed discussion of the highlighted critics in separate, short pieces.

You will find an interesting discussion of some questions raised by the use of hypertext in critical essays in the article by Laurie Osborne: "SAA Hyperessay on Electronic Shakespearean Criticism" at <http://www.colby.edu/personal/leosborn/open.html>.

5.1.2. Length of essays

In general you would be wise to avoid asking your readers to load larger files; especially large files will be signaled on the site with an indication of size. An essay of 4,000 words takes up about 25K on disk before any formatting is added -- and the tagging for HTML can add 20% in size (SGML is even more verbose).

In any case, you should remember to use headings and sub-headings freely, since this will allow for the creation of an initial table of contents at the head of the discussion, from which readers can branch immediately if they so wish.

5.1.3. Footnotes and documentation

In addition to the interconnection of self-contained hypertext additions to your essays, you will probably want to include more traditional footnotes. You will, in effect, have three levels of documentation:

a) In-text citation

Where possible, limit documentation to parenthetical citation in the text; all citations will be linked to the appropriate document if it is part of the edition, to the Bibliography if it is not.

b) Footnotes at the end of the same document

Where discursive or explanatory comment is needed, you can either create a short note at the bottom of your document, linked internally, or make a separate file. The test should be both the length of the note, and its value to the reader as a separate file to be loaded.

Notes at the end of the document should be limited to at most a few sentences. They will be numbered in the conventional way; the number should be enclosed in square brackets and tagged (see Appendix A, 3.11 and 3.12), and each will have at its conclusion a link back to the same point in the text from which it was accessed.

c) Longer notes or essays linked to your main document

Longer comments, discursive notes, linked essays and so on should be created in separate files and linked to the main body of your discussion. The degree of flexibility here is considerable; it is advisable, however, not to create separate long notes to long notes for fear of losing your readers in hyperspace. You can, however provide links to other essays, sources and so on.

5.2. Essay: A survey of critical approaches to the play

The survey should cover the critical reception to the play since its first performance to the present day. Where it is possible for you to assemble an anthology of critical materials (see below), the items in it should be linked to the survey.

5.3. Essay: A stage history

Like the critical survey, the stage history of the play should cover the period from its first performance to the present. For some plays there is an embarrassment of riches; you should select representative performances to illustrate general tendencies in the earlier periods, and the most influential or controversial in more recent times. Your discussion of the history of performance will be a good opportunity for you to include graphic materials, where copyright can be obtained, and perhaps some video clips.

5.4. Essay: A critical discussion of the play

This will be your opportunity to bring the insight you have gathered from your study of the play to a wider audience. Like the other essays in the edition, the critical discussion should be structured to use the medium of hypertext effectively.

5.5. Source materials

One of the major strengths of the Internet Editions will be the ability of the Editor (or collaborators) to provide extensive excerpts from Shakespeare's sources, and other contemporary materials that in one way or another illuminate the text. In due course a library of early literature will be developed, of which many files will be of use in more than one play. Plutarch, Holinshed, and Ovid are obvious examples.

Other possibilities include documents and contemporary illustrations of materials that inform our understanding of specific issues within the plays. Written materials not yet in the electronic public domain may be re-edited; copyright permission must be obtained for graphics. A good example of an edition that provides a wide range of supporting documentation is Frances E. Dolan's recent edition of The Taming of the Shrew (Bedford Books of St Martin's Press: Boston, 1996).

Source material may be abbreviated where necessary by omission or summary (in square brackets). You may use old spelling if you prefer, with a minimum of editorial alteration (collated where necessary), but you should modernize u/v, i/j and long s; expand contractions; and normalize unusual typography. Give foreign language sources in translation, with an indication where the original may be found. Modern spelling is the best choice unless old spellings are at issue.

5.6. An annotated bibliography

The intention here is to provide scholars and students with a flexible tool for deciding what further reading they may wish to pursue. The bibliography should be comprehensive, and should include influential or typical earlier works, as well as more detailed selections from works written in the last thirty years.

The annotations should give the reader a general sense both of the material covered and the approach taken by the author. Each entry will be accompanied by keywords that will assist the reader in searching (see Appendix A, section 4).

5.7. An anthology of criticism

Another area where the Internet Editions will have a great advantage over printed editions will be in the capacity for providing additional critical and scholarly discussions of the play. The anthology should begin with the earliest reactions to the play and continue, copyright permitting, to the present day. There are virtually no limits to the amount of material that can be put on the site; the Survey of Critical Approaches to the play should, however, provide a starting point for readers, and give an overview of the material that is available in the anthology (see 6.2. above).

Early critics can relatively easily be included from early out-of-copyright editions with the help of OCR (Optical Character Recognition) scanning; the Coordinating Editor may be able to provide assistance in creating the basic files to be proofread. More recent writings will be more of a challenge, but you will find that in many cases authors will be glad to gain the additional public offered by the universality of the Internet Editions.

Critical articles will be linked to the plays as appropriate (where passages are referred to or quoted), and to each other. You should also include a list of keywords at the beginning of each passage that will allow for searching for particular periods, authors, kinds of criticism and so on.

5.8. A discussion of computer analyses of the play

This section of the edition is optional, or can be contributed by a scholar who specializes in the subject.

5.9. Graphics, sound, video

Guidelines for the inclusion of illustrative materials in graphic, sound, and video formats will be developed as the site is established. All materials of this kind will be accompanied by explanatory text, from a simple caption to an extended discussion, and all will be tagged with keywords that will assist a user in a search. It will be important to include as much information about the material as possible.

It is your responsibility to obtain photographic prints (and permissions to reproduce them) for any illustrations or facsimiles that you wish to include. Contact the Coordinating Editor on the format for submitting graphic material.

5.10. A glossary

One of the things that computers do well is indexing. You should compile a glossary for two kinds of users: the student who needs assistance with unfamiliar words you do not wish to annotate on each appearance, and the scholar who seeks information about Shakespeare's usage. Each word should appear in the glossary in its normalized form, with a selected list of occasions it is used. References, as elsewhere, should follow the guidelines for cross-references in Appendix A, section 3.

5.11. An Index

[To be completed when the final decision on the software that will index the site has been made.]

5.12. Appendices

Consult your Coordinating Editor well before submitting your material about the number, kind, and length of appendices. These may include:

  1. Settings for songs, when available. It is your responsibility to submit the setting in final, scan-ready form.
  2. Recording of the copy-text lineation, where that is frequently different from the editor's. If an appendix is used for this purpose, the information should not be duplicated in the collation.

5.13. Concordance

When the edition has been published, it will be possible to generate a concordance, or a series of concordances for different purposes. An ideal concordance will provide normalized forms for all words, as well as the separate forms; to create such a concordance it will be necessary to encode the texts with "deeper" tagging than is envisioned for initial publication.

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