HyperHamlet: A Database of Quotations from and Allusions to Shakespeare’s Most Famous Tragedy

The HyperHamlet corpus – a digital humanities project at the university of Basel – is a databank of references to Shakespeare’s much-quoted play Hamlet. Research into quotations has traditionally focused on the way in which individual texts, authors or genres refer to their sources. HyperHamlet, on the other hand, takes its source text as the point of departure and thus makes studies about post-Shakespearean “recycling processes” possible. HyperHamlet helps trace and investigate reappropriations of Hamletean motifs and phrases not only in fictional genres, but also in non-fiction. To date the corpus comprises about 10,000 data sets from four centuries ranging from the occurrence of a single keyword to book-length adaptations. Moreover, the database is designed to accommodate not only Shakespearean traces in English, but other languages as well. The enormous heterogeneity of the material entails a careful elaboration of the annotation structure to ensure sensible data retrieval. The annotation structure in turn documents the wealth of intertextual strategies. As it turned out much-used categories, such as the differentiation between allusion and quotation had to be reevaluated while rarely noticed differentiations, such as the variety of marking devices for the presence of an intertextual reference, had to be worked out. What is more, the study of form and function of quotations as a linguistic, a literary and a cultural phenomenon is one of the possibilities to bridge the gap between the philological sister disciplines of linguistics and literary and cultural studies.