ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that Early English Books Online (EEBO) is the tip of the iceberg with regard to the potential for electronic resources to revitalize our conceptions of Shakespeare's historiography. Scholarly electronic editions have an innate capacity to highlight relationships between the history plays themselves and between the plays and the historical accounts on which they draw. Scholarly articles situate themselves within a field of relations, most of which the print medium keeps out of sight and relatively difficult to follow, because in print technology the referenced or materials lie spatially distant from the references to them. Like the scholarly article, a Shakespeare play is necessarily situated "within a field of relations", but it is hard work navigating that field when using the restricted format of a print text. Connections between Shakespeare's histories can be highlighted within digital environment, and here electronic edition has potential to radically change the way students and non-specialist readers encounter the texts.
