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Tuesday, May 10, 2005
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Online Database Will Hold the Mirror Up to 'Hamlet,' Gathering Every Commentary on the Play
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"To hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure."
-- Hamlet to the Players, Act 3, Scene 2
More has been written about Hamlet than about any other Shakespeare play, and attitudes toward the work's main character have shifted over time, says Eric C. Rasmussen, a professor of English at the University of Nevada at Reno.
"Victorians saw Hamlet as a wilted wallflower, but in the 60s he was sort of the prototypical angry young man," says Mr. Rasmussen, who is also the university's director of graduate studies. "The way people think about Hamlet seems to be a mirror for the way we view our current cultural moment."
Mr. Rasmussen should know. He has spent the past 10 years working with a team of scholars to compile every piece of scholarship and criticism about the play, and then to link it, line by line, to the text in an online database. The mammoth project, supported by some $1-million in grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, is nearing completion -- although editors plan to add to it as they find more material.
"If you are interested in a particular line of the play, to be able to see 400 years' worth of commentary on that line is pretty remarkable," he says.
About half of the group's work is available on a free Web site. But readers won't find commentary for most of the play's most famous lines yet, because notes for the first half of the script have not yet been uploaded. The scholars hope to have notes for all 3,474 lines up in the next few months, at which point visitors can better discover the meaning of "To be, or not to be," among other passages.
The database is a high-tech advance in what literary scholars call a variorum, an edition with multiple versions and notes by editors and scholars about the work. "The idea was you could collect everything that's ever been said" about a work, says Mr. Rasmussen. A printed variorum of Hamlet published in 1773 spanned 10 volumes, he says; by 1821 it had reached 21 volumes.
When the Modern Language Association commissioned a new printed variorum, in the early 1990s, the editor, Bernice W. Kliman, had a brainstorm: Why not use computers to organize the material, and possibly publish it online or on CD-ROM? Officials at the MLA were not sold on the idea, but they allowed Ms. Kliman to proceed with the database if she could come up with the financial support on her own.
"I just knew, even though the general editors were not very sympathetic to the idea, that the Internet was going to be the future," said Ms. Kliman, who is now a professor emeritus of English at Nassau Community College and still leads the project.
Scouring the Archives
The printed edition, which is still several years away from being published, will include only the highlights -- or what Ms. Kliman calls "compressed contextual collations." The Internet allows the scholars to share all of their findings.
"Not everybody wants to read 30 or 50 commentaries on Line 762 -- they would rather have a learned opinion about what are the main currents of thought about it," she says.
The online edition does not include every comment from 20th-century critics, in part because of copyright concerns. "We're being very cautious about it," Ms. Kliman says. "We tried to, of course, credit the edition, but also just paraphrase rather than copy sentence by sentence."
Mr. Rasmussen notes that the research has involved some literary detective work. "We have pretty much scoured the archives for everything that anyone has written about Hamlet," he says. Members of the team even combed through the copy of the play owned by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and included the comments he made in the margins.
Mr. Rasmussen jokes that he was chosen for the project for his youth as much as his academic qualifications (he started when he was 34). "People often will spend a lifetime working on the variorum and then die, leaving shoeboxes full of information," he says.
The project signed on multiple scholars, to make sure that the work got finished. The four principal editors are Ms. Kliman; Mr. Rasmussen; Hardin Aasand, a professor of English at Dickinson State University, in North Dakota; and Nick Clary, a professor of English at Saint Michael's College, in Vermont. Each of them has worked on one-fourth of the play, with the help of a total of 30 or 40 graduate students.
How do today's scholars view the eccentric lead character from Shakespeare's play?
"Right now people seem to like Hamlet," Mr. Rasmussen says. "Hamlet is someone you can actually psychoanalyze. Very few literary characters are so complex that you can actually treat them as if they're a psychoanalytic subject."
And the amount of writing about the play shows no sign of letting up, he says -- about 500 books and articles are written on the subject each year.
"What's fascinating," Mr. Rasmussen says, "is that people can continue to write new and interesting stuff about it."