Sharing Shakespeare around the Globe: UK and USA join forces to bring the bard to the worldwide web

The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford is joining forces with the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC, to create the Shakespeare Quartos Archive, a freely-accessible digital collection.

The one-year project will unite all 75 quarto editions of Shakespeare’s plays, pre-1641, into a single online collection. In the absence of surviving manuscripts, the quartos — Shakespeare’s earliest printed editions — offer the closest known evidence of what Shakespeare might actually have written, and what appeared on the early modern English stage.

They are of immense interest to scholars, teachers, editors, and theatre directors, yet due to their rarity and fragility, are not readily available for most to study. The Shakespeare Quartos Archive will make these earliest quartos freely accessible for in-depth study to Shakespeare students across the globe.