Global Shakespeares provides global, regional, and national portals to Shakespeare productions within a federated structure. As the archive grows, you will be able to view and study productions either in an environment focused on one area—Shakespeare Performance in Asia is the first of these—or in the context of world-wide Shakespeare production. The archive is a work in progress and currently includes a catalogue of more than 296 productions, 75 video clips, and online videos of over 30 full productions. This archive is intended to promote cross-cultural understanding and serve as a core resource for students, teachers, and researchers. We invite you to participate in this international research and educational online community.

Peter S. Donaldson, Director & Editor-in-Chief

The center of creativity in Shakespeare performance is shifting from Europe and the U.S. to Asia, where directors such as Ninagawa Yukio, Suzuki Tadashi, Ong Keng Sen, Wu Hsing-kuo, and many others experiment with combinations of traditional and contemporary theatre, new strategies for working across languages and genres, new ways of reaching diverse audiences.

These works are widely recognized as among the most innovative and distinguished in the world; they are changing how we understand Shakespeare, serving as a forum for theatre artists to deal with such contemporary questions as national and Asian identity, and reshaping debates about the relation of East and West.

Shakespeare Performance in Asia (SPIA) chronicles this exciting new wave of East-West cultural exchange. The site showcases video highlights with English subtitles, photos, and texts from Asia, the U.S. and Europe. The database is intended to promote cross-cultural understanding and serve as a core resource for students, teachers, and researchers.

Current features include:

* A catalogue of more than 200 productions compiled by Alex Huang, which will be continuously updated.
* A collection of video clips from major productions.
* Interactive maps and timelines.
* Interviews and biographies of directors and actors.
* Essays on Asian Shakespeare by major scholars.

Regular updates will greatly expand the above resources, and introduce new features, including glossaries of key terms and full videos of many productions.

Cross Media Annotation System

Our development team has developed the “Cross Media Annotation System” (XMAS). The application is comprised of a multimedia essay editor, a discussion component, and an annotation workspace for various media (DVDs, images, texts, streaming video). XMAS has been in use at MIT for several terms and has worked very well to support online student discussions that include video examples, multimedia essays, in class presentations and online instructor comment on student work. Instructors at Vanderbilt University, University of Queensland, University of Hawaii, and Bentley University have had success in using XMAS in their humanities courses.

Classroom System: HyperCard Driven Laserdisc Players

Our first project, funded in 1992, the Classroom System aimed to link all Shakespeare films available on laserdisc to electronic texts and to develop a variety of tutorials and lexica in a system that allows students to write multimedia essays that include an unlimited number of precisely defined “live” video citations. Presently, 38 complete films are linked to text, including Oliver and Zeffirelli Hamlet, Olivier and McKellen Richard III, Polanski and Welles Macbeth, Kurosawa’s adaptations of King Lear (Ran) and Macbeth (Throne of Blood).

What is in the Archive now?

1. The Folio Collection

• Images of all pages of the Shakespeare First Folio of 1623, including all press variants.
• The Oxford Electronic Edition of the plays (OEE), based on the Oxford Complete Works edited by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor.
• An electronic transcription of the Folio text, from the Oxford Text Archive (OTA).

1. The Hamlet Collection

• Hamlet texts: In addition to the OEE and the OTA Folio transcription, the Archive contains transcriptions of the First Quarto (1603) and Second Quarto (1604/5) based on the The Three-Text Hamlet (3-Text), ed. Paul Bertram and Bernice Kliman.
• Images of the Huntington Library copy of the First Quarto (1603).
• Images of the Folger and Huntington copies of the Second Quarto (1604/5).
• The Alan Young Hamlet Art and Illustration Collection. The Folger portion of the collection now includes 1440 images for the period 1700-1899.
• Sample film sequences for Hamlet 1.4 and 1.5 from the Johnston Forbes-Robertson production (1913), the Ragnar Lyth film (1982) and the Richard Burton production, directed by John Gielgud, at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater (1964).

This website is designed and maintained by the MIT Shakespeare Project in collaboration with the Folger Shakespeare Library and other institutions. We aim to provide free access to an evolving collection of texts, images, and videos relevant to Hamlet’s first encounter with the Ghost (Act 1, Scenes 4 and 5).

To make the site more useful in the classroom, we include commentary and guides to all materials and detailed lesson plans written by expert teachers from around the country.

We have assembled electronic texts of three major modern editions (the Arden, the Folger, and the 3-Text Hamlet), page images of the first three printed editions of the play (The First Folio, The First Quarto, The Second Quarto), an extensive collection of artwork and photographs, and sequences from three film versions — the Forbes-Robertson film of 1913, the Ragnar Lyth film of 1984, and the filmed record of the Richard Burton-John Gielgud production of 1964.

• The Enfolded Hamlet, which allows access to variant readings from F1 and Q2 in an innovative interface.
• Textual and commentary notes created over four centuries
• Digital facsimiles as well as diplomatic transcripts of important editions.
• Commissioned essays about Hamlet
• Alan Young’s multimedia essay on Hamlet art and illustration
• Other materials for the study of Hamlet illustrations through 1900

HamletWorks is edited by Bernice W. Kliman, Nicholas Clary, Hardin Assand, and Eric Rasmussen.