Electronic editions of Texts Related to Shakespeare & early modern literature
Shakespeare Works and Sources
Cardenio
Cardenio is considered a lost play, for which we have no surviving manuscripts and no early modern printed copy. Added to the stationer's register in 1653, we believe that the play was a collaboration between Shakespeare and his fellow playwright, John Fletcher. Scholars such as Gary Taylor now confirm that a play called Double Falsehood, published in 1727, was based on three manuscripts of the lost Cardenio play. Stephen Greenblatt and Charles Mee have now collaborated on a reconstruction of Shakespeare and Fletcher's Cardenio and, through The Cardenio Project "contacted theater companies in different parts of the world and asked if they might be interested in reading the script and adapting it for a performance in their own cultural circumstances."You can also learn more about the historical records, provenance traces, and even see manuscripts of original songs from the play at the Lost Plays Database.
Holinshed's Chronicles (1577)
For a detailed and richly edited resource on this work, visit The Holinshed Project. You might also be asked to work on an assignment to explore Multiple Electronic Editions of Holinshed's Chronicles, whose volumes contributed material for some of Shakespeare's plots.Plutarch's Lives (1517)
These texts inspired many of Shakespeare's history plays, including Anthony and Cleopatra, Julius Ceasar and Coriolanus.Parallel Lives, also called Lives , influential collection of biographies of famous Greek and Roman soldiers, legislators, orators, and statesmen written as Bioi parallëloi by the Greek writer Plutarch near the end of his life. By comparing a famous Roman with a famous Greek, Plutarch intended to provide model patterns of behaviour and to encourage mutual respect between Greeks and Romans. Twenty-two pairs and four single biographies have survived. One of the better known comparisons is that of the Greek orator Demosthenes with the Roman orator Cicero. (Encyclopedia Britannica)
A Mirror of Magistrates (1555; 1559)
The British Library includes a number of scanned images from their edition of the Mirror. If you're seeking to read the complete Mirror, Archive.org has a very bare-bones transcription of an 1815 edition of the work."Perhaps no other work of secular poetry was as widely read in Tudor England as the historical verse tragedy collection A Mirror for Magistrates. For over sixty years (1559–1621), this compendium of tragic monologues presented in the voices of fallen political figures from England’s past remained almost constantly in print, offering both exemplary warnings to English rulers and inspiring models for literary authors, including Spenser and Shakespeare.
University of Massachussets Press introduction to Scott Lucas's edition of the Mirror.
Want to read more about the specific sources for each of Shakespeare's plays? Shakespeare Online includes very thorough essays on each of the plays, including specific quotes that may have inspired individual plots and characters.
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Additional Contexts
The Gutenberg Bible (c. 1455)
If you are researching early print culture in your classroom, you have probably already heard of the Gutenberg's first printed book. As the Library of Congress summarizes:The Gutenberg Bible is the first great book printed in Western Europe from movable metal type. It is therefore a monument that marks a turning point in the art of bookmaking and consequently in the transition from the Middle Ages to the modern world. Gutenberg’s invention of the mechanical printing press made it possible for the accumulated knowledge of the human race to become the common property of every person who knew how to read—an immense forward step in the emancipation of the human mind.
The printing of the Bible was probably completed late in 1455 at Mainz, Germany. Johann Gutenberg, who lived from about 1400 to about 1468, is generally credited for inventing the process of making uniform and interchangeable metal types and for solving the many problems of finding the right materials and methods for printing. This Bible, with its noble Gothic type richly impressed on the page, is recognized as a masterpiece of fine printing and craftsmanship and is all the more remarkable because it was undoubtedly one of the very first books to emerge from the press.
The text of the Gutenberg Bible is the Latin translation known as the “Vulgate,” which was made by St. Jerome in the fourth century. The Bible is printed throughout in double columns, for the most part, with forty-two lines to a page. The capital letters and headings are ornamented by hand in color. The three volumes are in white pigskin bindings, which date from the sixteenth century.
The British Library has high-quality scans of a paper copy and a vellum copy available for side-by-side comparisons. The site also includes a handy timeline of important dates surrounding the publication, and Background essays on Gutenberg's texts, his life, and the making of the Bible.
Queen's Men Editions
The Queen's Men were a (now) lesser-known acting troupe that is nonetheless credited with inventing the history play genre, and whose performances extended from the founding in 1583 through the beginning of the seventeenth-century in 1603. According to the editors,"Shakespeare certainly relied on the Queen's Men' plays when writing his own histories, taking plots, characters, and occasionally phrases from The True Tragedy of Richard III, for instance, or The Famous Victories of Henry V. Less precisely, the Queen's Men's also seem to have influenced Shakespeare's comic sensibility and they perhaps suggested to him the dramatic effectiveness of the juxtaposition of high and low scenes - a device that the Queen's Men use to great effect in most of their plays."
In the Queen's Men Editions site, you can read the plays performed by the company, which are richly edited and include not only modern-spelling but annotations, critical comments, and collation of differences across copies. The site also includes information about the Performing the Queen's Men project, which staged production of these plays for modern audiences.
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Shakespeare's Contemporaries
Ben Jonson (1572-1637)
Ben Jonson was responsible for the "To the Reader" preface that accompanies Shakespeare's illustrated bust on the First Folio. Like Shakespeare, Jonson tackled early modern culture and politics, although some might argue his style is more acerbic and satirical than Shakespeare's. Some of his famous plays include Volpone (1606), The Alchemist (1610), and Bartholomew Fair (1631). Jonson also wrote a number of court masques, a very popular genre of performance popularized in the Tudor and Stuart eras.At The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson Online, you can read about Jonson's chronology, find contextual essays on his works, and follow a timeline of his life and publications. Some parts of the site are paywalled (including annotated editions of the works), but all the features mentioned above are open access.
For an online edition of Jonson's works, you may visit the Holloway Pages. Although these are not scholarly editions (that is, Holloway did not edit the text, collate different copies together, or add any footnotes or annotations), the texts are very clear, well formatted, and easy to follow. The page additionally contains paratextual material from Jonson's Complete Works Folio, including the preface and commendatory poems. If you prefer the experience of reading from a scanned facsimile, Archive.org contains a number of nineteenth- and twentieth-century scans, all of which are very well preserved and can offer a glimpse into early editorial practices.
Finally, Caroline Duroselle-Melish has a fascinating post about books owned by Ben Jonson, many of which bear his signature and some marginal notes.
Thomas Dekker (c. 1572-1632)
The Honest Whore Part I and Part II (UVic's Digital Renaissance Editions) provide detailed editorial notes, introductions, and details on the play's publication history, including digital facsimiles. They are also working on an edition of The Whore of Babylon (1607), edited by Frances E. Nolan and Anna Pruitt. Thomas Dekker collaborated with a number of fellow playwrights like Thomas MIddleton, John Webster, and John Ford. For more information on his plays, see the entries in A Digital Anthology of English Drama (no full-text plays in this resource).Thomas Middleton (1580-1627)
Although no formal digital editions are available for Thomas Middleton's plays, you can find scanned facsimiles of nineteenth-century anthologies at the Hathitrust. This edition includes The Roading Girle (co-written with Thomas Dekker), The Widdow (1652), and The Mayor of Queenborough (1661). Other popular Middleton plays include A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (1625), A Game at Chess (1624), and Women Beware Women (1657).Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593)
Although Marlowe was highly successful in his time and remains a canonic early modern playwright, there are no contemporary digital academic (that is, annotated, collated) editions of his works. However, Luminarium offers full-text versions The Tragedy of Dido (1594), Tamburlaine the Great (1590), Doctor Faustus (1604), The Jew of Malta (1633), and others, as well as poetry and translations. You can also find full-text versions of Tamburlaine courtesy of the Folger Digital Editions, and at Project Gutenberg. The British Library's scans​ of the 1631 edition of Doctor Faustus and this annotated version by Tufts University's Perseus Digital Library offers yet another option for reading the play. You can read about Marlowe's history, chronology, and his plays at the Marlowe Society's website.Elizabeth Cary (c. 1584-1639)
Elizabeth Cary earns the credit of being the first early modern woman to publish a play under her own name. The closest to an edited text we can find for The Tragedy of Mariam (1613) is a collaborative annotation created in Genius. This edition includes informative annotations about Cary, her historical contexts, and specific plots and characters within the play. Additional options include an audiobook edition via Archive.org and PDF scan of the print edition created by W. W. Norton. Can't find a live performance to see what Cary's work looks like in action? Check out this recorded 1995 performance from the drama department of the University of London.John Webster (c.1580-c.1635)
You're likely most familiar with Webster's play The Duchess of Malfi (1623). The BBC has a very rich website featuring scenes from the play illuminated by candlelight, interviews, essays, and a historical look at the different British actresses who have played the titular role. If you want to explore some of Webster's other woks, Luminarium includes links to his solo and collaborative plays (mostly from Google Books). Our ever-reliable Project Gutenberg also has a full-text transcription of Malfi freely available online.Sir Thomas More's Utopia (1516)
If you're interested in learning about voyages to the new world, this fictional description of the island Utopia may be of interest to you. Sir Thomas More is credited with having invented the "utopian" genre, and this volume is an exploration of early modern politics, culture, and book history itself. The work includes a number of fictional letters from renowned scholars such as Erasmus supporting More's account as accurate and real, and even offers a Utopian alphabet as a way to support its fiction. You can explore the various editions and incredibly diverse paratexts by visiting The Open Utopia. As the editors explain: "The Open Utopia is a complete edition of Thomas More’s Utopia that honors the primary precept of Utopia itself: that all property is common property. But Utopia is more than the story of a far-off land with no private property. It’s a text that instructs us how to approach texts, be they literary or political, in an open manner: open to criticism, open to participation, and open to re-creation."---------------------------------------------------------------------
Repositories and Corpora
English Broadside Ballads Online
Ballads are perhaps some of the best, most authentic sources for early modern popular culture. Although these publications were designed to be sold cheaply and quickly discarded, the sheer number of surviving ballads shown on EBBA demonstrates the value that these songs and stories carried for early readers. These ballads could be sung at pubs, or heard over as you walked down St. Paul's Churchyard. Through EBBA, readers are invited to see ballads as "texts, art, music, and cultural records." The site contains open-access facsimile scans of each ballad, modern-type transcriptions, and even recorded versions of the songs.
Emblematica Online
Emblems are yet another illuminating and versatile early modern genre worth exploring. As the editors of this resource explain, "emblems are concise yet potent combinations of texts and images that invite, and require, decoding. In a concise format, they reveal the mentalities and attitudes of the period from c. 1500-1800 in an assemblage of texts and images. Typically an emblem consists of a motto, an often puzzling image called the pictura, and a subtext called a subscriptione or epigram." Emblematica Online allows users to search emblems by date, location, and collection (what library holds the original image). Unlike many of the resources above, this site includes texts in a variety of languages, which is a useful reminder that England belonged to a rich European culture much larger and more diverse than we often realize by studying English-only literature.Prints and Ephemera: The Huntington Digital Library Collection
Want to explore even more pop culture history? See the Huntington Library's collection, which "contains a selection from the Huntington Library’s holdings of more than 650,000 prints, posters, ephemera, color plate books and extra-illustrated books. American and British images dominate this incredible archive of visual culture spanning five centuries---from the 1500s through the 1900s---with special emphasis on eighteenth and nineteenth century society." The Huntington collection also has an impressive amount of digitized manuscripts.Corpora*
*descriptions below come courtesy of the developers and editors for each resource.
The Lampeter Corpus of Early Modern English Tracts is a collection of texts on various subject matters published between 1640 and 1740 - a time that is marked by the rise of mass publication, the development of a public discourse in many areas of everyday life and, last but not least, the standardisation of British English.
The Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Early Modern English, consisting of over 1.7 million words, is part of an overarching project at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of York to produce syntactically annotated corpora for all stages of the history of English. Each of the 448 text samples in the corpus is available in three forms: parsed, part-of-speech tagged, and unannotated text, as explained in detail in the annotation guidelines. In addition, the corpus is divided into three subcorpora.
Early Print offers a range of tools for the computational exploration and analysis of English print culture before 1700. The site was designed to help scholars make sense of the incomparable textual archive produced by the EEBO Text Creation Partnership, consisting of a set of transcriptions of the first two centuries of English print. While EEBO-TCP provides access to a massive collection of texts that promises to transform the way scholars approach this period, it also presents significant technical and conceptual challenges. The relative accuracy (given its scale) of the EEBO-TCP corpus that makes it such a valuable resource for scholars also makes it complex for computational analysis. The corpus faithfully reproduces the evolving and irregular orthographic and syntactic conventions of the early modern period, and retains much of the necessarily incomplete and irregular metadata drawn from the original title pages.Any computational approach to the EEBO-TCP corpus, therefore, needs to not only encounter the digital surrogates of early modern texts, but must take into account the material and ideological conditions that underlie this first information revolution.
The Corpus of Early English Medival Writing (CEEM) covers the period from 1350-1800.
The Corpus of Early English Recipes once fully published online will allow researchers to have a clear picture both of the evolution of the recipe as a genre, and of other language variables.
The Corpus of English Religious Prose is a diachronic, multi-genre corpus which, in its present outline, will cover English religious prose from 1150 to the end of the eighteenth century. It is designed to reflect both continuity and change of English writing in one of its most important domains, with emphasis on innovation, transformation, and loss in genres. It is suited to meet the needs of both long-term diachronic studies as well as synchronic studies, particularly from a pragmatic, text-linguistic perspective and with a special interest in the history of individual genres.
The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, London's central criminal court, were published from 1674 to 1913 and constitute a large body of texts from the beginning of Present Day English. The 2163 volumes contain almost 200,000 trials, totalling ca. 134 million words. Since the proceedings were taken down in shorthand by scribes in the courtroom, the verbatim passages are arguably as near as we can get to the spoken word of the period. The material thus offers the rare opportunity of analyzing spoken language in a period that has been neglected both with regard to the compilation of primary linguistic data and the description of the structure, variability, and change of English.
Visualizing English, which includes The Big Names of Science, containing 329 early modern scientific texts by 100 ‘Big Name’ authors, published between 1530 and 1724. The authors were selected on the basis of their reputation and influence as early modern writers who address scientific subjects.