Towards an AI-Driven Shakespeare Edition

This essay proposes that a thoroughly digital edition of Shakespeare can finally emerge, as artificial intelligence (AI) continues to disrupt the digital landscape and unsettle the academic humanities. Most of the innovations in Shakespeare publishing occurred over 150 years ago. The age of the Internet has offered an alternative distribution medium, but has prompted few true improvements. Even the most ambitious modern digital-forward editions have largely replicated the content plans of the seminal eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Shakespeares. The essay’s first half uses the language of digital publishing to examine the development of editions during the initial two-and-a-half centuries of Shakespeare in print. The second half describes how an AI-driven Shakespeare edition can move beyond the traditional editorial and publishing model by creating multiple sets of tailored content such as glosses and explanatory essays that will appeal to particular audiences, instead of presenting a monolithic content set. An edition leveraging AI would also require a revolutionary editorial approach. Humans would retain their primacy and human judgment would still guide the edition, but AI would execute the bulk of the donkey work and increase output without sacrificing quality. This Shakespeare edition would finally realise the promise of the digital age.