Galey 2014

Galey, Alan.

Introduction: Scenes from the prehistory of digitization

"What role does Shakespeare play in this archive picture of culture memory, in the Victorian period but also within the more general scope of modernity that Nora considers? How does the preoccupation with archiving, as described by Derrida and Nora and embodied by Malone, shape the ways we understand represent Shakespeare's texts? This book explores these questions in ways that shed light not only on historical instances of Shakespearean archive fever, like Malone's variorum edition, but also on their connections with digital tendencies in the present. Shakespeare's texts give a habitation and a name to the specters of forgetting and loss that haunt any archival enterprise." (3)

"Whatever else Shakespeare may be, his works stand as an exceptional problem for the idea of the straightforward transmitting and archiving of cultural texts, and the various responses to this problem reveal human insights of a different kind." (4)