“Tangled in a Net”

This chapter argues that linked digital editions enable audiences and authors to represent William Shakespeare as source and adaptor as well as originator. The complexity of Internet Shakespeare Editions 2 is partly a function of the fact that it is a first-generation digital humanities project. When Founding Editor Michael Best launched the project in 1996, he imagined it as a "one-stop shop of resources in Shakespeare study." The rich array of materials already in the "one-stop Shakespeare shop" can be processed and digitally packaged in many different ways. The structuring of texts also implies that the text is "well wrought," to revive a New Critical valuation. The chapter aims to restore Shakespeare to a network of literary texts. It suggests that a network of digital files is a better representation of the early modern literary scene than the Shakespeare-centric view thereof that has been created both by subsequent literary history and by the way that scholarly editions are constructed.