ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses a teaching experiment carried out in 2000–2001 with the students of Pisa University English Department's course, 'History of Theatre and Drama in English'. The idea was to produce a hypertext of some nineteenth-century promptbooks of Hamlet considered as landmarks in stage presentation, working both with younger researchers and, with the students, testing results and methods while producing writers archive. The development of hypertexts opens up an entirely new horizon in the sector of editing, and consequently of the publishing, of critical editions of William Shakespeare. J. P. Kemble was one of the few actor managers to edit his texts personally and with punctilious precision. The hypertext and the teaching work which result from writers study are intrinsically capable of reflecting the true, collaborative nature of the theatrical act, at the meeting point of philology, acting, theatre technology and power games in management and critical practice, the latter expressed both as reviews/letters and as essays/lectures.
