The Chronicle: 5/27/2005: Database Will Hold the Mirror Up to 'Hamlet,' With All Commentary on the Play

The Chronicle: 5/27/2005: Database Will Hold the Mirror Up to 'Hamlet,' With All Commentary on the Play: "About half of the group's work is available on a free Web site (http://www.hamletworks.org). 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."