Digital libraries offer their browsers the opportunity to see reproductions of texts they may not otherwise have the chance to view. Those who peruse the Schoenberg Centre for Electronic Text and Image's online collection of the Furness Shakespeare Library will find it a delightful resource, both because of the images of the collection, and the ERIC interactive tutorials that provide excellent Renaissance historical content and thought‐provoking questions about some of Shakespeare's plays. This is an attractive, well‐designed site with a lot to offer the Shakespeare student with an interest in viewing facsimile texts and variant editions, and provides students with some excellent examples of textual scholarship and information about Elizabethan England.
The collection is searchable by author or title, or by a quick browse search that offers fields for title, author, and a date limitation. The only problem with the quick search feature is that the date limit is not as easy to manipulate as one might like because, once selected, the date cannot be changed. In general the pages are easy to read, but on occasions graphic impact takes precedence over usability. A good example is the article on Horace Howard Furness in yellow typeface on a black background, which is difficult to read on screen. The piece on the Furness Memorial Library is a PDF document that is much easier on the eyes, and it is a shame that the accompanying information on Mr Furness was not also presented in this manner. Some of the ERIC interactive tutorials are also rather difficult to read as they move along too quickly, but this can be addressed by advancing them manually. There are no help files, but as the site is fairly straightforward to search, their lack is not a problem.
A comparable site is the British Library's Treasures in Full: Shakespeare in Quarto (www.bl.uk/treasures/shakespeare/homepage.html). Both are free online resources that offer users a chance to read digitized original texts and compare variant editions. However, the Furness Library collection offers a larger array of texts than the British Library and provides the researcher with broader understanding of the literature that Shakespeare drew on in the creation of his plays due to the inclusion of secondary sources.
On the whole this is an extremely professional and polished presentation of a valuable Shakespeare collection that will be useful to undergraduate and graduate students seeking electronic access to these rich and fascinating works. I would recommend this for an academic library or even a large public library.
