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• 1 2017-01-14T06:44:02-08:00 Shakespeare & Holinshed's Chronicles 8 Digital Texts make Shakespeare's source material accessible and searchable plain 2017-01-14T11:10:37-08:00 The Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland (1577/1587) are well known to be a favorite source for Shakespeare; a number of his plays draw on material narrated within these volumes. The set of texts are often referred to in short as "Holinshed's Chronicles," since they were started by Rapheal Holinshed; over the course of their development over time, many additional writers contributed context to them. Much like Shakespeare's Henry VI plays and Macbeth, scholars typically refer to them in ways that suggest a single author but we know they contain the work of multiple hands and minds.
  
  You can learn the basic details about this text (specifically the 1577 edition) on this page from the British Library, which not only offers information about the text itself but also explains its relationship to Macbeth and other works by Shakespeare and his contemporaries.
  
  Digital technologies have ensured that you have multiple ways to consult this work in both the 1577 and 1587 editions--the ones published during Shakespeare's lifetime and the ones we expect that he and the literate members of his audiences would have access to––as well as more recent editions.
  
  To see these books in the form that Shakespeare would have seen them, take a look at these images taken from the 1577 edition at The British Library. Read in conjunction with the text of the play, the fifth image provided and its surrounding text provides a great and intriguing example of how Shakespeare relied on and adapted the books he read. Take a look: In the image, we see Macbeth and Banquo as well as the three people they meet--described in the play in terms that make their gender ambiguous and unnatural. The Holinshed version allows us to read Banquo's question, "What manner of women...are you?" alongside a woodcut that shows them in dresses; in Shakespeare's version, we only have Banquo's comment, "you should be women, / And yet your beards forbid me to interpret / That you are so" (1.3.45-47). Neither of these textual pieces tell us what the sisters looked like on stage, but we can see from Holinshed what Shakespeare might have seen before he made his own version of them.

  (For a scholarly discussion of the description in the play, see this article by Brett D. Hirsh.)

  You can also access Holinshed's Chronicles in larger portions, and more specifically, in transcriptions of these old texts that allow us to read them without having to see them in the original type. While it is certainly a great idea to see these works in an early form--as close to the way that Shakespeare saw them as we can get––you may find that you read the old type very slowly. You will get faster at reading old typefaces as you do more of it, but in the context of a course term, you may not have as much time to devote to practicing as you'd like. Transcriptions of these old works help make the process of reading the text go more quickly. And more significantly, they also allow for word and phrase searches that allow you to find material you're looking for more readily. 
  
  One of the most useful initiatives in digital technology for students of Shakespeare is Oxford University's The Holinshed Project. This initiative has culminated in the online provision of parallel texts of the 1577 and 1587 editions of the text. You can search for specific words and also navigate them by "regnal years," since these volumes are organized by the name of the king. (A useful sidenote: Holinshed only covers a period where England had Kings at the top of the power structure; the history of the reigns of Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth are too recent to appear in them).  
  
  Other ways to access Holinshed
  • Early English Books Online has a transcription of the 1577 edition, including the sections in this large volume on the reign of Edward I that we might consult to better understand, for example, Shakespeare's treatment of Scotland, as alluded to in plays such as Henry IV and Macbeth. 
     
    • From the title page, you can do searches for words so that your results show you the places where your search term appears. Keep in mind that these editions do not change the old spellings of words. If you do a word search within these pages, you will need to make sure you're not missing something with alternate spellings from Shakespeare's time, when spelling had not been standardized to the point where there were consistent rules for spelling. Even a proper name like Macbeth, for instance, will be spelled Macbeth and Makbeth.
       
    • Here's an example of a table of contents page from a search for "Macbeth" that indicates with a ❧ symbol the larger sections in which the word "Macbeth"  appears.
       
  • Early English Books Online also has a transcription of the first and second volumes of the 1587 edition. 
  • You might also read Holinshed's Chronicles in the 1808 editions published by Internet Archive.