The MLA is excited to announce that the Center of Digital Humanities Research at Texas A&M University (TAMU) will be the new home of the New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare (NVS) series. Texas A&M will make the NVS editions openly available to scholars on a richly resourced, fully networked digital platform and will become the editorial and governance center for the project, under the direction of Laura Mandell. In order to ensure a smooth transition, the MLA is providing onboarding funding for the project.
Started in 1860 and accepted as the only reference editions of their kind, NVS editions offer not only complete text of Shakespeare’s plays but also centuries of scholarly opinion and interpretation, dating, sources, emendations to stage history, and influential interpretations of particular words. Through the resources of the Center of Digital Humanities Research at TAMU, new editions will continue to be produced and editions previously published in print will be available online.
The reimagined digital editions are the result of over two years of consultation and research by the members of the MLA Working Group on the Future of the New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare: Lena Cowen Orlin (Georgetown Univ., chair), Matt Cohen (Univ. of Nebraska, Lincoln), Julia Flanders (Northeastern Univ.), Alan Galey (Univ. of Toronto), and Valerie Wayne (Univ. of Hawai’i). In consultation with the general editors of the NVS series and its editorial teams, the working group sought ways to ensure the future of the NVS. Thanks to their collective efforts, these definitive volumes will be made accessible to a wider audience with the intention of encouraging new forms of digital scholarship.
A proud owner of a copy of the second folio, TAMU is already home to the editorial offices of the World Shakespeare Bibliography and is delighted to use its digital media to make the NVS editions widely accessible to researchers and students.