Victorian Illustrated Shakespeare Archive: Digital Archive as Critical Argument

Abstract

The Victorian Illustrated Shakespeare Archive is an online open access resource which contains over three thousand illustrations taken from the four major editions of Shakespeare’s Works in the Victorian period. With these illustrations often neglected by academic scholarship, the resource aims to allow images that have been separated by both time and space to be brought together to generate new meanings and new interpretations. While this aim is significant from a Shakespearean and visual culture perspective, the archive was also created as a space to investigate and make an intervention into wider debates concerning digital ‘authenticity’ and how we can utilise the critical practice of remediation to help us to better understand (and, perhaps, to make arguments with) digital archives. By emphasising the visuality of the illustrations, then, the archive serves to make a comment on the historical importance of these images and how book illustration as an art form has been critically neglected.