"Such Stuff as 'Texts' are made on". Digital Materialities and (Hyper)editing in The Internet Shakespeare Edition of 'King Lear'

Against the background of increasingly pervasive digital technologies, much scholarly attention has been attracted, over the last few decades, by the impact of digital tools and resources in the field of Shakespearean textual studies, where several issues are still open to debate (Erne 2021; Estill 2019; Lavagnino 2014; Malone, Greatley-Hirsch 2021; Greatley-Hirsch, Jenstad 2016; Massai 2021). In the light of a radical rethinking of the ‘materiality’ of the text, this article more specifically addresses some of the affordances, as well as the possible dangers and prospects of digital scholarly editions of the playwright’s works. Focusing on Michael Best’s Internet Shakespeare Edition of King Lear (2001) as a remarkable case in point, the article illustrates how print-based views of textual transmission and editorial mediation are radically reconceptualized within an interactive environment (Driscoll, Pierazzo 2016) where readers are allowed to navigate across the diverse textual variants of the play, including old-spelling transcriptions of the early witnesses, and to access a huge amount of multimedia materials available at the click of the mouse (Best 2011). Considering the paradigm shift from ‘editing’ to ‘archiving’ (Desmet 2017; Galey 2014) and the more recent expansion of platforms hosting interoperable digital humanities projects (Jenstad et al. 2018; Malone, Greatley-Hirsch 2021), the article eventually illustrates how, in the wake of Best’s pioneering model, a digital edition of King Lear could be further enhanced with dynamic links to other interoperable resources and tools. Their still partly unexplored hermeneutic potential invites reflection on how the affordances of the digital medium affect our engagement with and understanding of Shakespeare’s textual heritage.