if computers do not substitute for books they may substitute for the absence of books; and this is what concerns me as a scholar working to rehabilitate women's writings.

(Kathryn Sutherland, 'Challenging Assumptions: Women Writers and New Technology' 53)

About a year ago, as I was preparing for last year's MLA session organised by Thomas Crochunis and chaired by myself entitled 'British Women Playwrights around 1800: Rethinking the Paradigms', I found myself wondering how someone would consider these women playwrights' works alongside men's when the former are not readily in print. With the development of electronic media, and in particular the World Wide Web, this question is somehow altered because the possibility of reading, studying, and comparing these works is now possible—this 'now' is of course still more a potential 'now' rather than a practical one, as I will explain in a moment.

I volunteered to take care of the practical aspect of the web site since I had been using the internet extensively over the previous two years, creating Romanticism On the Net, an electronic journal devoted to Romantic studies, and putting together an electronic edition of Mary Shelley's short-story 'The Mortal Immortal'. I was attracted by the possibilities offered by the conceptual web site Crochunis and I had discussed. Not only would this site contain texts of plays written by women playwrights, some available for the first time since their performances, but also a discussion page where scholars would be able to exchange ideas and comments, and other elements that could only take place within an internet environment, such as electronic archives of plays—of which more in a moment—, and links to other sites dealing with theatre, works by women playwrights, and issues of electronic encoding. The first play currently available is Jane Scott's Broad Grins or Whackham and Windham, performed at the Sans Pareil theatre in 1814, with an introduction by Jacky Bratton, who provided the text from the copy submitted to the censor's office under Lord Chamberlain. I wrote an editorial note which briefly addresses my re-formatting of the text for easier access on the net, basically breaking it in acts and scenes, as well as improving the readability on screen and/or on paper by indenting the text. Several texts of plays by other women writers currently unavailable in print will be added to the BWP1800 site over the next couple of years. Five years ago, Peter Holland wrote of the print culture that it had 'become so expensive, so heavily capitalized and so economically intensive that our freedom of exploration is severely limited' (Holland 19). The situation has unfortunately not changed much, but the advent of electronic publishing has the potential to offer new possibilities for the publication of texts unavailable in print. And we intend to make the most of this new electronic medium, and its current popularity around the world, both for students and teachers, as well as for libraries that do not have these texts.

We have recently added a detailed—and soon to be annotated—bibliography to the site that contains links to tables of contents, publishers' descriptions, and electronic reviews published in Romanticism On the Net and Romantic Circles Review. Among forthcoming additions to the site, a 'discussion form' will soon be available. These postings will certainly be related to issues raised in the published essays in the first instance, though they will also hopefully discuss the project as a whole and its potential expansion. The possibility of hypertextual links between essays, postings, texts, and also other web sites, other projects, other discussion lists, should allow for an extended discussion between scholars and for the re-assessment of the works under consideration.

In order to achieve an official status within our academic community, this project had to grow beyond Crochunis's and my enthusiasm, and involve other scholars. Thus, we put together an editorial board of recognized scholars who vouch for the work undertaken in the BWP1800 project. We expect the members of the editorial board to participate in our forum discussion, as well as to make suggestions regarding the future of the site, and to get involved themselves in one form or another.

Another aspect of the BWP1800 site is the addition of scholarly essays and responses to them in order to foster discussion and provide a new forum for issues related to women playwrights. These essays are being offered on a regular basis at the site, every six weeks. The first essay was by Crochunis, entitled 'Electronic Editing of Women's Theater Materials: Purposes, Contexts, & Questions', which raised several issues about the possibility of electronically editing works by women playwrights. Jane Moody wrote a response entitled 'The Electronic Theatre Archive', debating some of Crochunis's arguments in more detail, particularly his discussion of what Moody calls the 'electronic academy' and 'electronic archive', which she describes as follows:

The figure of cultural authority in the electronic academy is the scholar-editor, an individual who acts as the professional mediator of a (single) text to an audience of individual readers. In that process of mediation, the scholar-editor invokes "contexts" only to subordinate them to a "text", a text defined by an individualistic (and arguably masculine) model of authorship. (Moody n. pag.)

She contrasts this with the second model Crochunis explores, which she refers to as 'electronic archive' and defines 'by its seditious dissolution of the academic nation-state, a jocular disdain for boundaries between texts and contexts, the literary and the non-literary, and a quiet insouciance about distinctions between performance and writing' (Moody n. pag.).

This discussion of 'electronic archive' leads me to one of the major additions to the site that will appear some time in late 1999: a hypertext edition of Joanna Baillie's De Monfort. Although the Internet promises a potentially limitless quantity of information, there are only a limited number of hypertext editions of Romantic texts currently available, and none of these are plays. Rather, one finds poems, short-stories, and, to my knowledge, only one novel (Steven Jones' excellent edition of The Last Man). This has partly to do with the difficulty of putting together such editions from a simple, straightforward practical aspect—it is easier to scan or type a 300 line poem than a 300 page novel, notwithstanding the amount of time then devoted to HTML or SGML coding. But it is also due in part to the current lack of academic credit that such work entails.

I think that an electronic archive of De Monfort, fashioned after the example of Jerome McGann's Rossetti hypermedia archive will achieve this 'seditious dissolution of the academic nation-state' that Moody talks about. The archive would be constructed, to quote McGann, 'so that its contents and its webwork of relations (both internal and external) can be indefinitely expanded and developed' (McGann 38-39). I propose to edit De Monfort electronically, with SGML coding, notes, and hyperlinks to other materials. I have in mind a 'central text hypermedia' (Hunster 144), to borrow Lynette Hunster's phrase, that is an electronic edition with appended notes and hypertext links, rather than a historical-critical edition, which only compares various versions of the play. The hypertext environment of the internet would allow for the inclusion of other texts by Baillie (primarily prefaces from the various editions of her plays, and also letters), as well as other elements such as scanned images of playbills, information on the actors involved in the first London performance, and links to other internet projects such as 'The Romantic Chronology' and Romantic Circles. I am aware of the fact that, as Claire Lamont notes,

In hypertext the capacity to supply annotations is greatly increased, but the dimensions of the text and the capacity of the reader remain unaltered. The amount of material which can be amassed for potential access is formidable if the annotating intention is dispersed into an electronic network. There is a danger that the reader will lose first the text, and then him- or herself in the mazes of hyperspace. (Lamont 60-1)

Bruce Graver also expresses this specific worry when he writes 'We are not interested in creating a vast, complex web of documents, at the center of which is a Lyrical Ballads poem, but which is so rich in annotation that the poem is buried beneath the weight of its associated texts' (Graver 176). In the case of this hypertext edition of De Monfort, I would argue that the nature of the play actually invites the multiplicity of links to external elements beyond the text in the way that the performed play was more than simply the printed text. To mention but a few, one can think of the actual theatre in which the first performance of De Monfort took place, with its unique conditions in terms of capacity, lighting, and the general habit of the London theatre-going crowd. There are also the well-known actors involved in the play, John Philip Kemble and Sarah Siddons, with their own personality and popularity at the time, plus the reviews published both of the first performance and when the identity of the author became public, the play's reception by other Romantic figures, etc. All these elements can be described and hypertextually referred to in an electronic archive in a way that no printed editions of this play could ever achieved, unless it was several thousand pages long. Because of the restrictions of space (and, by implication, because of unrealistic cost), a print edition would not include the texts of the play, the reviews, biographical sketches of the actors, and also pictures of playbills, a chronology of Baillie and other Romantic writers, information about Drury Lane in 1800, when the play first opened, and then in 1821, when the play was revived by Edmund Kean. Furthermore, as Moody notes,

[this] electronic textuality will prompt further exploration of the collaborative nature of playwrighting. The electronic archive will draw attention, too, to the social and political circumstances—of class and sociability as well as in relation to public institutions and the domestic sphere—in which authorship takes place. (Moody n. pag.)

This electronic archive would ultimately be the product of a genuine collaboration between various scholars, as well as theatre specialists. Some would contribute scanned images of plays and information about Drury Lane, others would send annotations to specific sections of the play, from their own published works or from their current research. The editorial board would also make sure that all the elements of the archive are up to academic standards. In some ways, the collaboration between scholars that could, and hopefully will, result from such a project is another important aspect of this enterprise. Indeed, as Peter Holland asserts,

A new form of work like hypertext might make us [academics] genuine collaborators, less possessive of our intellectual property, resisting in the very way we communicate between each other the systems of individual status that our political ideology and academic practice enforce. (Holland 22)

It is unfortunate that scholarly editing is not recognised by departments around North America, at least in the sense that, however many years one spent editing someone's work, the resulting edition is often counted as one publication, no more, no less. And since electronic publication is only in its early stage of departmental recognition for the tenure-review process, the project might have a slow beginning. Slow maybe in its early stages, but it will keep on growing and, as the field of scholarship devoted to works by women playwrights itself progresses, it is my hope that our project will play an important part.

References

• Graver, Bruce. 'This Is Not a Hypertext: Scholarly Annotation and the Electronic Medium.' Profession 1998 (1998): 172-8.
• Holland, Peter. 'Authorship and collaboration: The Problem of Editing Shakespeare.' in The Politics of the Electronic Text. Ed. Warren Chernaik, Caroline Davis, and Marilyn Deegan. Oxford: Office for Humanities Communication Publications, 1993. pp. 17-23.
• Hunster, Lynette. 'Hypermedia Narration: Providing Social Contexts for Methodology.' Conferences Abstracts. Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing-association for Computers and the Humanities Conference, Apr. 1992; quoted in Claire Lamont, 'Annotating a Text: Literary Theory and Electronic Hypertext,' in Electronic Text: Investigations in Method and Theory, ed. Kathryn Sutherland (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997) p. 60.
• Lamont, Claire. 'Annotating a Text: Literary Theory and Electronic Hypertext.' in Electronic Text: Investigations in Method and Theory. Ed. Kathryn Sutherland. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. pp. 47-66.
• McGann, Jerome. 'The Rationale of Hypertext.' in Electronic Text: Investigations in Method and Theory. Ed. Kathryn Sutherland. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. pp. 19-46.
• Moody, Jane. 'The Electronic Theatre Archive - A Response to Thomas Crochunis' "Electronic Editing of Women's Theater Materials: Purposes, Contexts, and Questions".' British Women Playwrights around 1800. (15 December 1998) http://www-sul.stanford.edu/mirrors/romnet/wp1800/essays/cro2.html
• Sutherland, Kathryn. 'Challenging Assumptions: Women Writers and New Technology.' in The Politics of the Electronic Text. Ed. Warren Chernaik, Caroline Davis, and Marilyn Deegan. Oxford: Office for Humanities Communication Publications, 1993. pp. 53-67.