Since 1994, scholars at a number of universities have been working on an electronic variorum of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. What is a variorum? It collects both the play itself (including textual variants) and its attendant criticism, interpretations, and annotations as written by various authors through history. Usually variorums are in the form of books and thus limited in scope; this project is in the form of a web accessible database and theoretically unlimited in scope.

After 11 years the project still isn’t complete (and how could it be with people still writing on Hamlet to this day), but what is there shows the promise of what will come. Already one can see extensive commentaries on the play, often at the level of the single word. These comments are not yet linked to full bibliographic citations, though that is the eventual outcome. The site also includes electronic images of editions of the play and four searchable concordances.

This project is an excellent example of how technology can be used to assist literary study. This kind of narrowly focused but highly detailed project (narrow in its focus on one work, not narrow in its potential size) is made more easily possible and widely available thanks to computerized databases and electronic communication.

See a longer article at the Chronicle of Higher Education.

–Derik A. Badman