Perseus In Love!
(with Shakespeare)

Over the past several years, the Perseus Project has expanded into the English Renaissance. In addition to working on Shakespeare, we have developed new sites, entered the work of several of Shakespeare's contemporaries and sources, and created new prototype electronic editions.

Our aim has been to produce these electronic editions so that they serve as databases that are rich in information, rather than simply to duplicate the printed book on-line. Most recently, Perseus has been working in collaboration with the Modern Language Association (MLA) to produce scholarly editions of Shakespeare's plays.

Shakespeare's Contemporaries
In the fall of 1997, we released our WWW edition of The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe. A contemporary of Shakespeare, Marlowe's best known works include the plays: The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, The Jew of Malta, and Tamburlaine the Great, Parts 1 and 2. The Marlowe site, developed and edited by Graduate Research Fellow Hilary Binda with the assistance of Perseus staff members, currently includes not only Marlowe's plays and poetry but his translations of Lucan and Ovid, as well as the short pieces known as the Dedicatory Epistle to Mary, the Countess of Pembroke and the Epitaph on Sir Roger Manwood, in their Latin and English translations. Our finely tuned edition of Marlowe's play Doctor Faustus contains a side-by-side viewing option through which users may compare two different early modern versions of this text and also compare each of these to Marlowe's primary source text, The English Faust Book of 1592. Some of the texts of the Marlowe site are available in both modern and original spelling and punctuation versions, and many highlight the textual variants for a more scholarly audience interested in textual history. Our aim here, and throughout Perseus, is to make these texts available to a wide and diverse audience.

Critical Shakespeare
Since releasing the Marlowe site, we have been hard at work on Shakespeare. Specifically, we have developed several on-line New Variorum editions of Shakespeare's plays using the older (out of copyright) texts. New Variorum editions contain commentary culled from three centuries of Shakespeare criticism on a wide range of different issues, including performance history and character analyses. These scholarly editions also contain excerpted source material. They provide a tremendous opportunity for electronic publication since the printed texts themselves already contain an enormous number of internal "links" or cross references. The transformation of these paper links into an electronic environment we hope effectively facilitates the kind of research that the Variorum editions were designed for. In addition, an electronic Variorum, of course, opens this kind of scholarship to many readers who might not otherwise have had access to or knowledge of the print databases.

Thus far we have released a site organized around the 1913 version of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, edited by H. H. Furness. We have supplemented this site with more complete source materials, including Plutarch's Parallel Lives, a modernized edition of Sir Thomas North's 1579 translation of Plutarch, selected orations and letters of Cicero, and Julius Caesar's Gallic Wars. We have also developed bi-directional links between some of these sources, the commentary, and the play. This site was started as part of a course entitled Literary Texts on the Web, co-taught in the fall of 1997 at Tufts by Perseus Editor-in-Chief Gregory Crane and Hilary Binda. In the spring of 1998, Perseus and the Tisch Library received a shared grant from the Berger Foundation at Tufts to further develop this site and to begin work on a site on Shakespeare's Richard III. Look here for the Julius Caesar site; here for the text and commentary of Richard III.

Collaboration with the MLA
More recently, Perseus has been working in conjunction with the New Variorum committee of its publishing organization, the MLA, to develop a prototype for the upcoming newly edited editions. With the learned, gracious, and on-going help of the current New Variorum Shakespeare editors, and general editor Paul Werstine in particular, we have produced an on-line version of the 1990 Antony and Cleopatra, edited by Martin Spevack. Gregory Crane and Hilary Binda presented several different visual displays of this edition at the 1999 SAA (Shakespeare Association of America) conference in San Francisco to a group of editors who will continue to help direct the look and interface of the final product that we will present at the Annual MLA convention in December of 1999.

The Future of Shakespeare at Perseus
As we continue to refine our electronic version of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, we are also entering several different Shakespeare lexica that will ultimately be linked to each of the plays. Graduate Research Assistant Kreg Segall and Hilary Binda are working on Shakespeare lexica by A. Schmidt, A. Dyce, and C. T. Onions, as well as Abbott's Shakespearean Grammar. These will not only be available as separate resources with extensive links into the plays, but readers of the plays will also be able to turn on the lexica feature so that each of the words in the plays functions as a link to lexica entries. Next, we will enter all of the first edition--out of copyright--Variorum Shakespeare plays over the next several years. A nexus of texts will be added to these already expansive scholarly editions. We plan to provide, for instance, more complete sources for each play as well as original curriculum material aimed at both undergraduates and high school students. To this end, we have already begun working with a group of local high school teachers on planning for this curriculum development.

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document placed on-line 6/21/99, LMC