An international collaboration is creating an innovative "freely-accessible, high resolution" digital interactive archive of William Shakespeare's pre-1641 quartos; living artifacts that tell the story of how Shakespeare's Hamlet, Henry V, King Lear, Midsummer Night's Dream, and Romeo and Juliet, to name just a few, first circulated.

The University of Maryland's Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) Director Neil Fraistat says, "The quartos themselves offer crucial evidence about what actually was performed" by Shakespeare's troupe.

Because Shakespeare himself did not authorize a printed edition of his plays, what was published at the time represented what others heard, memorized or took from the marked-up "foul papers" of a particular production.

The quartos were essentially paperbacks produced soon after a play was produced and were meant to be read and thrown away. Fraistat uses the example of Hamlet's most famous soliloquy to show how different the published versions were:

- Hamlet Quarto 2 1604/5

To Be or Not To Be, That is the Question.
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles.
and

- Hamlet Quarto 1 1603

To be, or not to be, ay there's the point,
To die, to sleep,, is that all? Ay all:
No, to sleep, to dream, ay marry there it goes...

The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. will be the grant recipient for the collaborative in the United States, which includes MITH and the Huntington Library in California. The Folger holds the world's largest collection of Shakespeare's quartos. "The Shakespeare Quartos Archive heralds the future of textual studies, bringing these rare early texts out of their separate archives and onto the screens of individual scholars," says Folger Director Gail Kern Paster.

The nearly $120,000 NEH grant will provide initial funds for one year to create a technical proof of concept "working model" for the project by digitizing all 32 pre-1641 versions of Hamlet held by the participating libraries. "The JISC/NEH initiative gave us the opportunity and the incentive to attempt a truly international, collaborative, digital project," says Folger Project Director Richard Kuhta. "The guidelines challenged us to think collectively about what was possible, and to realize a shared ambition. It was exactly the prompt we needed to launch a conversation that transformed geographically distant collections into partner institutions."

"The University of Maryland is thrilled to be part of this international collaboration to bring Shakespeare's works to life in a digital way," said University of Maryland President C. D. Mote, Jr. "MITH has continually demonstrated the important role of technology in the humanities. This high-impact initiative will provide ready access to the Bard for scholars, students and the public alike."

The trans-Atlantic digital collaboration is being made possible by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and Britain's Higher Education Funding Council working though the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC). "This is a truly collaborative project.

Institutions in the U.S. and England will contribute digital images of their Shakespeare quartos, and the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities will provide the technology to allow scholars, students, and the public to analyze and compare these texts in an entirely new way," according to NEH Chairman Bruce Cole.

NEH Chairman Cole announced the Shakespeare Quartos Archive grant during a news conference Tuesday (March 25) at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C.

Fraistat estimates that it will take approximately three years after completion of the working model to complete the project for the remaining Shakespeare quartos. MITH's interactive site will ultimately be housed at Oxford University.
Another exciting aspect of the project is that Washington-area high school teachers will be able to provide their feedback to the project as it progresses. "We also have one other partner in this grant - the Shakespeare Institute, which is in Stratford, but based from the University of Birmingham. Their teachers, scholars and students will also be working with the prototype giving us feedback and functionality about what they'd like to see," Fraistat says. He also hopes that English students at the University of Maryland will be part of the review process.

Fraistat says, "We are proud to have as partners such institutions as the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Huntington Library, the British Library, and the Bodleian Library of Oxford University. This grant caps what has been an extraordinary year for MITH, in which it has received five major grants, covering the gamut from Shakespeare's Quartos to the preservation of Virtual Worlds."