Shakespeare Quarterly

Permalink for this paragraph 0 [1] Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories and Tragedies (London, 1632), sig. [A5].

Permalink for this paragraph 0 [2] Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (London, 1623), sig. A3.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 [3] Peter Stallybrass, “Against Thinking,” PMLA 122.5 (2007), 1580­–7; part of a cluster of articles on the database as a genre.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 [4] Neil Rhodes and Jonathan Sawday, ed., The Renaissance Computer: Knowledge Technology in the First Age of Print (London: Routledge, 2000).

Permalink for this paragraph 0 [5] Kirschenbaum noted the coincidence in “Editing the Interface: Textual Studies and First Generation Electronic Objects,” TEXT 14 (2002): 15–51, 19–20, n. 12. He also notes that 1949 was the year in which W.W. Greg first presented his “Rationale of Copy Text” as a lecture; see also Kirschenbaum, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 213–18.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 [6] On the significance of Busa’s work, see Suan Hockey, Susan Hockey, “The History of Humanities Computing,” in A Companion to Digital Humanities, ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 4.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 [7] N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999), 13–4, emphasis in original; on the term’s semantic slippage, see also Julia Flanders, “The Body Encoded: Questions of Gender and the Electronic Text,” in Electronic Text: Investigations in Method and Theory, ed. Kathryn Sutherland (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 127–8.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 [8] Hayles, Posthuman, 14.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 [9] W.W. Greg, “Bibliography—An Apologia [1932],” in Sir Walter Wilson Greg: A Collection of His Writings, ed. Joseph Rosenblum (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1998), 135–57, esp. 135, 137, 140, and 141; Greg repeats the definition no less than four times, as if to underscore the point about transmissibility.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 [10] Random Clod [Randall McLeod], “Information upon Information.” TEXT 5 (1991): 241–81, 246.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 [11] W.B. Worthen, “Performing Shakespeare in Digital Culture,” in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Popular Culture, ed. Robert Shaughnessy (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007), 241.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 [12] Ibid., 240.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 [13] Willard McCarty, Humanities Computing (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 110. The most accessible history of the term information is Geoffrey Nunberg, “Farewell to the Information Age,” in The Future of the Book, ed. Nunberg (Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 1996), 102–38; see also Ronald E. Day, “The ‘Conduit Metaphor’ and the Nature and Politics of Information Studies,” Journal of the American Society for Information Science 51.9 (2000): 805–11.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 [14] Worthen, 240.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 [15] McCarty, 10.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 [16] Ibid.; see also McCarty, 14–16, and Michael S. Mahoney, “The Histories of Computing(s),” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 30.2 (2005): 119–35.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 [17] In addition to Andrew Murphy’s discussion of digital Shakespeare projects in this issue [?], surveys of the field and representative project articles may be found in Ian Lancashire, “Editing English Renaissance Texts,” Shakespearean International Yearbook 2 (2002), 89–110; Monitoring Electronic Shakespeares, ed. Michael Best, spec. issue of Early Modern Literary Studies 9.3 (2004); Reinventing Digital Shakespeare, ed. Alan Galey and Ray Siemens, spec. issue of Shakespeare 4.3 (2008); Christie Carson, “The Evolution of Online Editing: Where Will It End?,” Shakespeare Survey 59 (2006), 168–81.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 [18] See Fredson Bowers, On Editing Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Dramatists (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania Library, 1955), 87.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 [19] Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber and Faber, 2007), 333–4.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 [20] See Michael S. Mahoney, “Cybernetics and Information Technology,” Companion to the History of Modern Science, ed. R.C. Olby, G.N. Cantor, J.R.R. Christie, and M.J.S. Hodge (London: Routledge, 1990); and Peter Galison, “The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision,” Critical Inquiry 21 (1994): 228–66.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 [21] V.D. Tate, “Microphotography in Wartime,” Journal of Documentary Reproduction 5.3 (1942): 129–38, 133.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 [22] Alice Brittan, “War and the Book: The Diarist, the Cryptographer, and The English Patient,” PMLA 121.1 (2006): 200–13, 203; see also Leo Marks, Between Silk and Cyanide: The Story of SOE’s Code War (London: HarperCollins, 1998), 11–2.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 [23] Brittan, 203–4.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 [24] William F. and Elizabeth S. Friedman, The Shakespearean Ciphers Examined (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1958).

Permalink for this paragraph 0 [25] David Kahn, The Codebreakers: The Story of Secret Writing (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1967), 34.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 [26] See Shawn James Rosenheim’s chapter “Deciphering the Cold War: Toward a Literary History of Espionage” in The Cryptographic Imagination: Secret Writing from Edgar Poe to the Internet (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1997), 151.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 [27] Bowers and Hinman’s military service in the area of intelligence was part of a well-known trend in which academics applied aspects of their training to intelligence and related military sectors. See Rosenheim’s chapter cited above, and Neil Rhodes’s discussion of F.W. Clayton, a classicist who also did work on Shakespeare’s Latin sources, and who worked on cryptanalysis in Bletchley Park with Alan Turing and in India during World War Two: Shakespeare and the Origins of English (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004), 165–6.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 [28] G. Thomas Tanselle, “The Life and Work of Fredson Bowers,” Studies in Bibliography 6 (1993): 1–154, 32–3.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 [29] Ibid., 34.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 [30] Jeffrey Masten, “Pressing Subjects: Or, the Secret Lives of Shakespeare’s Compositors,” in Language Machines: Technologies of Literary and Cultural Production, ed. Masten, Peter Stallybrass, and Nancy J. Vickers (New York: Routledge, 1997), 88, emphasis in original.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 [31] Ibid.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 [32] F.P. Wilson, Shakespeare and the New Bibliography, rev. and ed. Helen Gardner (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 34, emphasis added. Wilson’s editor and reviser, Helen Gardner, notes with irony that this section in Wilson’s original required the most correction (34, fn).

Permalink for this paragraph 0 [33] On pre-war tendencies toward information theory in bibliography, such as W.W. Greg’s scientific bent in his Calculus of Variants (1927), see Laurie E. Maguire’s chapter “The Rise of the New Bibliography,” in Shakespearean Suspect Texts: The “Bad” Quartos and their Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996), 21–71; and the references to Kirschenbaum in note 5, above. Recent examples of textual scholars drawing upon information theory may be found in Clod, “Information”; Peter M.W. Robinson, “Is There a Text in These Variants?”, in The Literary Text in the Digital Age, ed. Richard J. Finneran (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996); and Tom Davis, “The Monsters and the Textual Critics,” in Textual Formations and Reformations, ed. Laurie E. Maguire and Thomas L. Berger (Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 1998).

Permalink for this paragraph 0 [34] Kirschenbaum, “Editing,” 19–20, n. 12.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 [35] Weaver’s essay was published in the July 1949 issue of Scientific American, and reprinted in Science and Literature: New Lenses for Criticism, ed. Edward M. Jennings (Garden City, NY: Doubleday—Anchor Books, 1970), 13–27, emphasis in original. All references to Weaver’s “Mathematics” essay are from the Jennings collection; the epigraph is from p. 17. An expanded version of the Scientific American text, under the title “Introductory Note on the General Setting of the Analytical Communication Studies,” makes up Weaver’s half of his co-authored book with Claude Shannon, The Mathematical Theory of Communication (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1949); see also Weaver’s “Information Theory—A Nontechnical Review,” Science and Imagination: Selected Papers of Warren Weaver (New York: Basic Books, 1967), 198–211. Cf Day for a summary and critique of Shannon and Weaver.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 [36] Weaver, “Mathematics,” 16.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 [37] Ibid., 17.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 [38] Mark Twain, Is Shakespeare Dead? (New York: Harper, 1909), 5.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 [39] Ibid., 6–7.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 [40] Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New York: Ballantine, 1972), 401, emphasis in original.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 [41] Weaver, “Mathematics,” 17; see also Shannon and Weaver, 100 and 108.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 [42] Davis, 97.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 [43] See Davis, 97–8; references and worthwhile discussions can also be found in John W. Velz, “Judean and Indian Yet Once Again,” Analytical and Enumerative Bibliography 10.1 (1999), 21–9, and Nicholas Ranson, “Indian/Iudean Again,” in the same issue.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 [44] For an explanation of edit-distance, see Terry Butler, “Monkeying Around with Text,” TEXT Technology 15.1 (2007): 113–33, 124–7.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 [45] Bateson, 315.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 [46] Randall McLeod, “Unemending Shakespeare’s Sonnet 111,” Studies in English Literature 21.1 (1981): 75–96, 82–3.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 [47] Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?”, in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 101–20, 118.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 [48] Literature Online, (accessed 14 January 2010); Elizabeth Cary, The Tragedie of Mariam, The Faire Queene of Iewry (London, 1613) sig. D2.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 [49] Weaver, 17.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 [50] From the infamous reprint known as the Wicked Bible (London, 1631); see David Norton, A Textual History of the King James Bible (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005), 95–6.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 [51] James Joyce, Ulysses: A Critical and Synoptic Edition, ed. Hans Walter Gabler, Wolfhard Steppe, and Claus Melchior, vol. 3 (New York: Garland, 1984), 1726.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 [52] See C.P. Snow, The Two Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998). There were early attempts on both sides to find common ground, though not always successfully. John Robinson Pierce’s Symbols, Signals, and Noise (New York: Harper, 1961) has a chapter on “Information Theory and Art.” As noted above, Jennings’s 1970 collection Science and Literature: New Lenses for Criticism includes Weaver’s essay, “The Mathematics of Communication,” in which he explains the basics of Shannon’s model of communication. In the same year John P. Sisk published an article titled “The Cybernetics of Othello,” New Orleans Review 11 (1970): 74–7; the article examines Othello’s decision-making patterns, but does not engage cybernetics as a field. Graham Bradshaw critiques the so-called conduit metaphor from a Shakespearean perspective in “Precious Nonsense and the Conduit Metaphor,” Shakespearean International Yearbook 4 (2005), 98–. A recent promising link between Shakespeare and the worlds of information theory and programming may be found in Henry S. Turner, “Life Science: Rude Mechanicals, Human Mortals, Posthuman Shakespeare,” South Central Review 26 (2009): 197-217.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 [53] A.M. Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” Mind [new ser.] 59.236 (1950): 433–60.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 [54] Ibid., 446.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 [55] Stuart M. Shieber, “Lessons from a Restricted Turing Test,” Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery 37.6 (1994): 70–8, 72.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 [56] The episode (season 2, episode 5; first aired 23 October 1991) may be viewed at the series website: (accessed 14 January 2010; the Shakespeare material appears in the segment “Machines Who Think”); see also Shieber, 72. In fact Clay gives an incorrect answer at one point, claiming that The Two Noble Kinsmen is not recognized as a Shakespeare play.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 [57] G.H. Hardy, A Mathematician’s Apology (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1940), 66.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 [58] Léon Brillouin, Science and Information Theory (New York: Academic Press, 1956), 9.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 [59] Ibid., 9.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 [60] Quoted in Lily E Kay, Who Wrote the Book of Life?: A History of the Genetic Code (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2000), 220.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 [61] For a survey of this parable and its relevance to humanities computing, see Butler. He points out that Émile Borel, not Eddington, originated the typing monkey trope. Shakespeare seems to have become the monkeys’ target not long after Eddington popularized the parable in his 1927 Gifford lectures. The earliest instance I have found is James Jeans, The Mysterious Universe (New York: Macmillan, 1930), 4.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 [62] Other references to Shakespeare in the context of information theory may be found in Jagjit Singh, Great Ideas in Information Theory, Language, and Cybernetics (New York: Dover, 1966), 209; David Layzer, Cosmogenesis: The Growth of Order in the Universe (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990), 31; William A. Dembski, The Design Inference: Eliminating Chance Through Small Probabilities (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998), 216; David J.C. MacKay, Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003), 490; and Hubert P. Yockey, Information Theory, Evolution, and the Origin of Life (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005), 5.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 [63] Benjamin Jowett, “On the Interpretation of Scripture,” in Essays and Reviews: the 1860 Text and Its Reading, ed. Victor Shea and William Whitla (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2000), 504, emphasis removed.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 [64] Wilson, 42.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 [65] Greg, , 141.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 [66] William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, ed. Robert Kean Turner, Virginia Westling Haas, et al., The New Variorum Shakespeare (New York: Modern Language Association, 2005), 1.2.213–22. The commentary notes for these nine lines span eight pages in the Variorum.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 [67] Random Cloud [Randall McLeod], “Shakspear Babel,” in Reading Readings: Essays on Shakespeare Editing in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Joanna Gondris (Madison, WI: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1998), 1–70.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 [68] Hayles made this point about Shannon’s model in “The Future of Literature,” a plenary session for the symposium Literature, Culture, and the Digital Artifact, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, 13 January 2006.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 [69] This particular version of Shakespearean authenticity appears in connection with modern computing from its very beginnings in postwar information theory, but this is by no means the first time Shakespeare’s texts were authenticated by and for new media, broadly speaking. Margreta de Grazia has studied similar patterns with regard to the First Folio and eighteenth-century editions in Shakespeare Verbatim: The Reproduction of Authenticity and the 1790 Apparatus (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991); see also Peter S. Donaldson’s study of Shakespeare and early cinema in “Cinema and the Kingdom of Death: Loncraine’s Richard III,” Shakespeare Quarterly 53.2 (2002), 241–59. The present article is part of a larger project studying historical antecedents for this pattern of reciprocal authentication in relation to information technologies and archival/editorial projects from Shakespeare’s time to the present.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 [70] Maguire, 53–4.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 [71] Day, 810.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 [72] Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 108.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 [73] Ibid.; in addition to Hayles, Mother, see Kirschenbaum, Mechanisms; Nick Montfort, Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005); and essays in First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game, ed. Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004).

Permalink for this paragraph 0 [74] Day, 805–11; Davis, 106.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 [75] I borrow the phrase “cultural logic of computation” from the title of David Golumbia’s The Cultural Logic of Computation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2009).

Permalink for this paragraph 0 [76] Stephen Booth, “A Long, Dull Poem by William Shakespeare,” Shakespeare Survey 25 (1997), 229–237. The participants who did succeed in taking the debate somewhere interesting tended to be those who, like Booth, focused less on computational and statistical methods, and more on the critical assumptions about authorship and canon that the debate had exposed; examples may be found in other articles in the same issue of Shakespeare Survey.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 [77] Auden, 333–4.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 [78] For a bibliographic critique of EEBO see, Joseph A. Dane, Abstractions of Evidence in the Study of Manuscripts and Early Printed Books (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2009), 94.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 [79] Stanley Wells, Gary Taylor, et al., William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion (New York: Norton, 1997), 15.