The Second Reformation in Brandenburg: Aims and Goals

Abstract

James L. Harner (ed.), The World Shakespeare Bibliography on CD-ROM, 1983-1995, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1998 £390, ISBN: 052162536XAmongst the premier British academic presses, Cambridge University Press has been the most innovative in exploring the possibilities of electronic publication, and The World Shakespeare Bibliography on CD-ROM is an important addition to their list. This database, taken from the comprehensive annual bibliography published in Shakespeare Quarterly, cries out for electronic treatment, as anyone who has laboriously tracked through those volumes knows. The present release contains the bibliography for thirteen years, and future releases will extend the coverage to create a conspectus of the century's entire work on Shakespeare. Since this CD contains over 38,000 entries - many with further references embedded in them - the eventual size of the archive will be little short of astonishing.The data is accessed by powerful 'DynaText' software, which allows a range of search possibilities. One can undertake simple searches of the whole database, or more limited searches centred on author, title or keyword, or proximity searches of multiple terms. Navigation is aided by a contents table which indicates the user's present situation in the archive. Users can customise the database by creating their own links and adding bookmarks or annotation. The only technical difficulty I encountered is that hits on individual words are displayed at the top of the text window, making it frequently necessary to scroll back to read the whole entry. In future releases, CUP ought to revise the software to display each hit in its full context. It's also slightly annoying that essays in collections are linked to the volumes in which they appear but that the links don't work in reverse, so if you want to know the full contents you have to search on the name of the volume or editor. And you have to be wary about American/British inconsistencies: for Love's Labour's Lost you must search under both 'labour' and 'labor'.The database's usefulness can easily be exemplified. A standard on 'Hamlet' throws up 9635 hits. A proximity search of 'Hamlet' and 'source' 62. You can use searches to measure the ups and downs of critical fashion. 'Cultural materialism' occurs 246 times, but is easily outflanked by 'historicism' at 348 occurrences (though you can't look for 'New Historicism' since 'new' is a 'stop word', occurring too frequently to be searchable). …