U.S. and British libraries plan to reproduce online all 75 editions of William Shakespeare’s plays printed in the quarto format before the year 1641, Reuters reports. The Bodleian Library in Oxford and Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., have joined forces to download their collections, building on the work of the British Library, which digitized its collection of quarto editions in 2004. The project is designed to make all of the earliest printed versions of Shakespeare’s plays, many of which are only accessible to scholars, available to the wider public. The process of downloading the quartos will begin next month and will take a year to complete. Online visitors will be able to compare images side by side, search the plays, and mark and tag the texts…

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