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Frivolity – and It’s Not Even Friday
Thanks to Mark Tamminga for a lead to Google’s Shakespeare project.
While Project Gutenberg has had flat text for ever, it’s nice to have these antique digitized editions publicly available.
Though there is still a strange bias in the language of the texts. Go looking for Molière on Gutenberg, and the plays are available – 19 in English, 5 (only) in French, and one in Finnish. Racine is even more pitiful – 2 in English, one in French and one in Dutch.
Best to go to the motherlode at the Universal Library – ABU: la Bibliothèque Universelle.
It is interesting to compare Google’s Shakespeaer site with the one created at my own university http://ise.uvic.ca/index.html
The difference between the two is at the heart of the current web 2.0 developments and the large scale digitalization done by Google et. al. Google’s approach is fairly basic, while the one done by a Shakespear scholar has so much added value that it really is the better source of information about Shakespeare and the plays. So, which one will a Google search find?