Clifford E. Wulfman, The Perseus Garner: An Overview

Ward's Shakespeare Statue, Central Park, New York

Welcome to the Perseus Garner, the latest collection in the Perseus Digital Library.

The Garner is a gathering of primary materials from the early modern period in England (commonly called the English Renaissance) and selected secondary materials from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Begun with an electronic edition of the complete works of Christopher Marlowe, it now includes the works of William Shakespeare, important historical sources from the period, and a variety of secondary reference works. Our goal in assembling this collection is to provide scholars, students, and general readers with free access to important documents from the early modern period, many of which are difficult to find outside large research libraries, and to supplement them with helpful scholarship and criticism.

The Works of William Shakespeare

Foremost in the Perseus Garner are the works of William Shakespeare. Our primary edition is based on the famous Globe Shakespeare, the one-volume version of the great Cambridge Shakespeare (1891-3) edited by W. G. Clark, J. Glover, and W. A. Wright. The Cambridge Shakespeare was the reference edition well into the twentieth century, and many important works of scholarship are keyed to it.

The Garner also contains volumes from the magisterial New Variorum Shakespeare Series, the pre-eminent critical edition of Shakespeare's works begun by Howard Furness in the nineteenth century and continuing to this day. Each volume includes a fully collated edition of Shakespeare's text with line-by-line commentary and an extensive appendix containing textual histories, sources of the work, actors' interpretations, and a wide sampling of criticism. The New Variorum Shakespeare comprises twenty-two volumes, of which three--Antony and Cleopatra, Julius Caesar, and Coriolanus--are presently included in the Garner. Eventually the collection will contain the entire series.

Of particular interest to textual scholars will be our electronic facsimile of the First Folio, the compilation of Shakespeare's dramatic works published by fellow actors John Heminges and Henry Condell in 1623. Through arrangement with the Special Collections Department at Brandeis University, we have scanned the entire seventeenth-century edition at very high resolution and keyed each page image to act, scene, and line number.

The Works of Shakespeare

	First Folio	Globe Shakespeare	New Variorum Shakespeare
Comedies
The Comedy of Errors	F	G
The Taming of the Shrew	F	G
The Two Gentlemen of Verona	F	G
Love's Labor's Lost	F	G
A Midsummer Night's Dream	F	G
The Merchant of Venice	F	G
The Merry Wives of Windsor	F	G
Much Ado About Nothing	F	G
As You Like It	F	G
Twelfth Night, or What You Will	F	G
The History of Troilus and Cressida	F	G
All's Well That Ends Well	F	G
Measure for Measure	F	G
Histories
The First Part of Henry the Sixth	F	G
The Second Part of Henry the Sixth	F	G
The Third Part of Henry the Sixth	F	G
The Tragedy of Richard the Third	F	G
The Life and Death of King John	F	G
The Tragedy of King Richard the Second	F	G
The First Part of Henry the Fourth	F	G
The Second Part of Henry the Fourth	F	G
The Life of Henry the Fifth	F	G
The Famous History of the Life of King Henry the Eighth	F	G
Tragedies
The Tragedy of Titus Andronicus	F	G
The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet	F	G
The Tragedy of Julius Caesar	F	G
The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark	F	G
The Tragedy of Othello, Moor of Venice	F	G
The Tragedy of King Lear	F	G
The Tragedy of Macbeth	F	G
The Tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra	F	G	N
The Tragedy of Coriolanus	F	G	N
The Life of Timon of Athens	F	G
Romances
Pericles, Prince of Tyre		G
Cymbeline	F	G
The Winter's Tale	F	G
The Tempest	F	G
Poems
Venus and Adonis		G
Venus and Adonis		G
The Rape of Lucrece		G
Sonnets		G
A Lover's Complaint		G
The Passionate Pilgrim		G
The Phoenix and Turtle		G

Reference Works

The philological and lexicographical scholarship on Shakespeare is vast. We have used this scholarship to create a "hyper-annotated edition" of Shakespeare that will be of use to readers of all kinds. The Garner includes two of the most well-known and often consulted glossaries: Alexander Dyce's Glossary of the Works of William Shakespeare, and C. T. Onions's Shakespeare Glossary. These reference works contain thousands of glosses to Shakespeare's texts, which we have hyperlinked to facilitate use. We will soon add the indespensible Shakespeare Lexicon and Quotation Dictionary by Alexander Schmidt.

The Works of Christopher Marlowe

The Garner's literary selection is not confined to the works of Shakespeare. We also include an complete electronic edition of the works of Shakespeare's contemporary, Christopher Marlowe (this edition has, in fact, been available in Perseus for some time). The Marlowe materials include all of Marlowe's plays, his two known poetic works, Hero and Leander and The Passionate Shepherd to his Love, his translations of Ovid and Lucan, and the short miscellaneous works attributed to Marlowe, a dedicatory epistle to Mary Countess of Pembroke and the epitaph on Sir Roger Manwood. The edition comprises the extant sixteenth century versions and a variety of later historical collations, all of which may be viewed as complete texts or in side-by-side comparison with other versions. The edition of Doctor Faustus comprises the A text (1604) and B text (1616) as well as the play's major source-text, the English Faust Book.

Primary Sources

In addition to works of literature, the Perseus Garner also contains texts of interest to students of history. The Principal Navigations,Voyages, Traffiques, & Discoveries of the English Nation by Richard Hakluyt is an immense compendium of maritime information from the Age of Discovery; The Political Writings of James I is a collection of important writings by the monarch.

The Chronicles of England, Ireland, and Scotland, compiled by Raphael Holinshed and others and first published in 1577, were the source of many of Shakespeare's plays. Outside large research libraries they are seldom available except in abridged versions; the Perseus Garner will eventually include all six volumes as reprinted in 1808 (the present sampling is from Volume IV).

Secondary Sources

The Garner will collect important pieces of criticism as well. In this first release we have included M. W. MacCallum's Shakespeare's Roman Plays and their Backgrounds (1909) and will soon add others.

The Texts

We are committed to making the texts in the Perseus Garner conform as closely as possible to the original print editions. Although we have carefully proof-read the electronic texts presented here (paying particularly close attention to the primary texts of Shakespeare and Marlowe), any transcription process introduces errors. The Perseus site is actively maintained, and we invite all readers to report errata to the Perseus Webmaster; see the Help Pages for instructions.

This text is based on the following book(s):
The Perseus Garner: An Overview. Clifford E. Wulfman. April, 2001. Perseus Project.