A Description of Reading Shakespeare's Early Modern Readers, a Digital Database

Reading Shakespeare's Early Modern Readers, directed and co-edited by Jean-Christophe Mayer and co-edited by Margaret Vasileiou, is an online database focusing on early modern and eighteenth-century readers' responses to Shakespeare. Sponsored by L'Institut de Recherche sur la Renaissance, l'Age Classique et les Lumières (IRCL) at the Université Paul-Valéry in Montpellier, France, it documents manuscript inscriptions found in early modern editions of Shakespeare's poetry and plays, as well as early modern and eighteenth-century manuscript miscellanies, letters, and commonplace books in which inscribers have excerpted from or commented on Shakespeare and his works. This fully searchable database aims to promote research about early modern and eighteenth-century readers' responses to Shakespeare, as well as to provide researchers of Shakespeare, early modern books and manuscripts, history, and cultural studies with easily accessible evidence of early modern readers' reactions to, and appropriations of, Shakespeare.

Each database entry consists of one book or manuscript, and provides users with transcriptions and descriptions of excerpts, annotations, and other inscriptions; links to images of relevant pages; information, when available, about the inscriber(s); and bibliographies for further research, many with direct links to resources. Entries begin with, among other information, the author and title of the manuscript or book, the date of publication (when applicable), the approximate dates of the inscriptions it contains and, when necessary or helpful, a brief introduction that offers information about the book's history, its inscriber(s), or its contents. Descriptions and transcriptions of inscriptions, as well as links to images of the pages, are presented in an easy-to-read table format, allowing users to scan each book or manuscript quickly for inscriptions of interest and, when possible, to view those inscriptions in a digital image. Following the table, the editors offer brief commentary on the inscriptions, clarifying or expanding on, among other elements, the content of the book or manuscript, the identity of the inscriber(s), the response to Shakespeare evinced by the inscription(s), or the approximate dates of inscription.

As of the publication of this notice, the editors have viewed and selected for inclusion in the database more than one hundred books and manuscripts, all found in either the Bodleian Library, the British Library, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the United States Library of Congress, the National Library of Scotland, or the University of Edinburgh Library. Each database entry includes the shelfmark for the book and a link either to the relevant library web-site or, when possible, to the book's listing in the library's online catalog.

Together, these entries paint a broad picture of the editorial, personal, aesthetic, moral, and even political nuances of early modern and eighteenth-century readers' and theater-goers' reactions to Shakespeare. They reveal the place and importance of Shakespeare, and of early modern editions of his work, in the social, personal, cultural, and political lives of some of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century people who encountered, discussed, and reflected on him—as a playwright whose performances could be seen and heard onstage and as an "author" of the works found in published books. The inscriptions described and transcribed in this database show that Shakespeare's early editions came to serve a variety of purposes: as valuable commodities; as opportunities for readers to exercise their editorial muscles; as mementos of family continuity, erudition, and status; and as occasions for personal reflection. Shakespeare's presence in letters, manuscript miscellanies, and commonplace books variously placed him among (and often qualitatively above) other seventeenth-century poets and playwrights and figured him as a representative of the English national character and aesthetic, while passages of his plays and poems are excerpted and commented upon as poetic examples of commonplace topics and beautiful stand-alone passages. Moreover, some Shakespearean excerpts show Shakespeare inspiring inscribers' own literary creativity, as self-authored verse oftentimes follows or accompanies them.

Given the broad picture that these entries paint of early modern responses to Shakespeare, the editors believe that, in addition to providing researchers with an easily accessible resource...