“A Marvellous Convenient Place”: Collaboration in the Electronic Text

Abstract

Designers of electronic spaces have chosen comfortably familiar terminologies to make a complex medium comprehensible. It is a sign of the degree to which the previously foreign medium has become a commonplace part of our interaction with it that the terms are rapidly becoming so transparent as to acquire the status of dead metaphors. Few of us will now consciously think of a book as we download a web “page,” or of a supermarket when we obediently add an object (which is actually an item of electronic data) to our “basket” or “shopping cart.” This paper will suggest alternative metaphors as a means of delineating more clearly the aims of the Internet Shakespeare Editions: the electronic space as a stage for the performance of text, and the process of collaboration that produces the text as something akin to the processes involved in the production of a play. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, as Peter Quince organises the “hard-handed men of Athens” for the play that will be presented before the Duke, he chooses a “marvellous convenient place” (3.1.2-3) in the forest outside Athens for their rehearsal. The convenience Peter Quince admires is the result of the plasticity of the forest space: the “green plot” becomes a stage, a “hawthorn brake” their tiring house (the space offstage); the electronic medium at present is in a similar state of plasticity as techniques and conventions of display are malleable and have not yet hardened into tradition. Humanists have, I believe, both an opportunity and an obligation to help in the exploration of the new medium as a plastic space, suitable for the publication of data of special interest to those in our discipline.