Abstract
BARDS is a browser-based remix engine for three different textual versions and four graphic novel interpretations of Hamlet, allowing students and researchers to act as an editor of a visual text.
Between 1603 and 1623, there were three different editions of Shakespeare’s Hamlet published: Q1 (the first quarto) in 1603; Q2 (the second quarto) in 1604-5; and F1 (the text that appeared in the first folio, the first collection of all of Shakespeare’s plays) in 1623.
Q1 is the shortest at just over 2200 lines; Q2 and F1 are almost twice the length of Q1. All three have material unique to themselves. They also have shared material, but at times in unique order. Further, all three omit material that the other two contain. An editor’s challenge—your challenge—is to examine any part of the first scene of Hamlet in these three editions and make one edition that you feel best represents that portion of the scene.
Editing Q1, Q2, and F1 provides a fuller sense of Hamlet as text, but perhaps only a partial picture of Hamlet as drama. Plays were primarily played (rather than sold as books), so any editor’s challenge is to imagine how the words on the page might manifest themselves as actions on a stage. To help you in this respect, the BARDS web interface provides images from four graphic novels—with their words removed—so that you can overlay your edited text onto images. That is, you’ll need to imagine how the words on the page might appear as actions in a theatre (either a real theatre or the theatre of the mind).