Visualizing Variants: Shakespeare’s Textual Instability in Digital Media

Within the context of the manifold intersections between textual scholarship and new digital technologies, the outstanding position of Shakespearean texts has gained increasing prominence in the academic debate of the last few years. Illustrating some of the key points at issue in the debate, this paper argues that crucial aspects of Shakespeare’s inherently unstable and pre-print textuality (Murphy 2000) can be better revealed by the new tools that have historicized print-based notions of textual stability and authorial uniqueness, showing them as the product of a specific writing technology. The examples mentioned here epitomize the potentialities of digital tools in transcending the space of the book page and in overcoming the constraints of print, thus promising to recover the complexity of Shakespeare’s early-modern textuality in a variety of forms.