The Oxford Shakespeare Transcripts are exact reproductions in computer-readable form of bibliographically significant early printed texts of Shakespeare. The texts were originally prepared by Trevor Howard-Hill for use in his single colume concordances to Shakespeare (OUP, 1969f). They have since been reformatted to modern standards and carefully proofread by staff of Oxford University Press' Shakespeare Department for use in the new "Old Spelling" Oxford Shakespeare, under the general editorship of Dr Stanley Wells
This is a legacy resource. It is likely to be difficult to use, and is now mainly of interest for the study of the history of text encoding or digital humanities.
Encoding format: COCOA markup references used
Each text line corresponds with the same line in the copy text and begins with a space
* beginning a line instead of a space indicates a fully justified line -- i.e. a line where it is possible that the spelling has been affected by the compositor's need to fit several words to his measure
For folio texts the lineation corresponds with that established by Hinman, except that words broken at the end of a line are given in full at the end of the line in which they begin
Hyphenation has been retained when a word is broken over two lines
# (sometimes £ or %) appears in those situations where hyphenation has been retained because of a word breaking over two lines in the copy text and the word in question would most probably have had a hyphen anyway -- eg. lily-#livered man.
# (or sometimes £) is also used to distinguish some common homographs -- eg. "#will" (i.e. legacy) is distinguished from "will" (auxiliary verb)
When "carry-back" or "carry-forward" is used, the text line is reconstructed with the part that has been removed seperated off by a | (vertical bar symbol). In such cases indentation is removed, and all spacing is normalised
The full upper and lower case character set is used, with all spelling and typographical variations carefully preserved, with the exception of long and short s which are not distinguished. I/J and U/V are preserved
{} enclose italicised sections of the text
<A> authorial attribution code
<C> compositor attribution
<L> line number (T.L.N.)
<P> signature -- this is given preceding the first line of each page
<T> text title
<Y> when it appears indicates the probable type of copy: Q = quarto; M = foul papers
<S> speaker -- the name of the speaker appears between {}
<Z> Act/Scene, dramatis personae, etc.
<D> stage direction -- in some texts, stage directions are enclosed in double parentheses ((...)) in preference; this makes the text more easily processed by some software