Shakespeare Goes Digital: Three Open Internet Editions

In 1853, J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps began issuing, through publishers C. and J. Adlard, an extraordinarily elaborate edition of the works of Shakespeare. It ran to sixteen volumes in oversized folio and was copiously illustrated. The edition was intended for a strictly limited market—just 150 copies were printed. The price also reflected the restricted readership at which it was aimed: twenty-five copies were issued with the illustrations on India paper, at 150 guineas per set; the remainder sold for 80 guineas per set. As the final volumes began to appear in the mid-1860s, Halliwell-Phillipps began discussing a very different kind of Shakespeare project with the Adlards. His idea was to strip his edition to its bare bones in order to produce a popular text that would sell for just a shilling, or six percent of the cost of the eighty-guinea folio edition.¹

Halliwell-Phillipps subsequently explained to the publisher John Camden Hotten what his vision for the shilling edition had been, observing that "one of the chief objects in the original design was the distribution of copies by employers amongst the working classes."² The editor was motivated by the emergence of a working-class readership in the early to middle decades of the nineteenth century. This readership, Halliwell-Phillipps sensed, might take to Shakespeare if the playwright's works were made readily available either at a low price or, ideally, free of charge by paternalistic employers. His instinct was correct, even if his own idea never came to fruition: by the end of the 1860s, at least three publishers issued shilling editions of Shakespeare and the texts sold extraordinarily well.³ The era of "mass Shakespeare" had arrived.

Halliwell-Phillipps's double project anticipates developments in Shakespeare publishing from the end of the twentieth century, as the playwright's text moved from the page to the computer screen. When Thomas Nelson issued the Arden Shakespeare CD-ROM in 1997, the initial (pre-sales tax) selling price was ?2,500 in the United Kingdom and $3,995 in the United States. In the nineteenth century, a certain Professor Pyper at the University of St. Andrews had managed to subscribe to Halliwell-Phillipps's edition, but it seems unlikely that any academic of average means could have afforded to buy the electronic Arden. The same could be said of other early computer-based Shakespeare resources, such as Chadwyck-Healey's Editions and Adaptations of Shakespeare, which have always been priced well beyond the budget of individual purchasers (at whom they are not, in fact, marketed).⁴

But just as Halliwell-Phillipps had twin visions of a highly elaborate package sold at the highest possible cost and a basic alternative at a minimal price or wholly free of charge, so too did the digital world split between high-cost packages and cheap or free-access offerings. Early in the 1990s, the plays had been rendered into a form which could be presented on screen, and this version of the text—the so-called "Moby Shakespeare"—was distributed through various Web sites, the most enduring being those established by Matty Farrow in Australia and Jeremy Hylton at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.⁵

The Moby text is based on the Globe edition of Shakespeare, first published by Macmillan in conjunction with Cambridge University Press in 1864.⁶ The reasons for choosing this text appear to be lost in the mists of prehistoric digital time. Copyright on the Globe edition had long since lapsed—an important consideration. It may simply have been happenstance that led the Moby text's creator to this particular copyright-free edition, but it remains an interesting choice, nonetheless. The Globe was itself part of a bifurcated publishing scheme. Alexander Macmillan had commissioned William George Clark and William Aldis Wright (with John Glover, who dropped out of the project) to produce a scholarly edition of the plays, the first created by university academics. Just 1,500 copies of this nine-volume Cambridge Shakespeare edition were printed, selling at 10s. 6d. per volume, with the total cost running to almost £5.^7...