It's hard to say who is over the head of whom here.
Perhaps we're just high speed motorists passing each other
on the elevated cloverleaf of time and bits.
You want to see the iterations of Shakespeare's writings,
because the writing is by "William Shakespeare" (in quotes
because it remains to be seen if the writer was from Avon).
You know that you'll need every scrap of information on this
master, because the scraps you've already been fed prove
beyond reasonable doubt that this writer was, indeed, The Bard.
Now, I would submit that your awareness is premised on a
fairly intact record that can be translated to ASCII. Your
interest in the fine points is premised on that record.
Given an equivalent record of a lesser writer,
you might not waste time hunting down the physical record.
So, I have used an analogy to comparing relative weight.
Put the value of ASCII text of Shakespeare on one side,
and place the digitized images of a folio on the other.
Certainly in physcial form, the folios weigh more,
but the wealth of Shakespeare's words is in the abstract text.
Let me say this about physcial objects.
They are the history of art.
We have collected them with great relish,
because they are one-offs and cannot be copied.
Literature, on the other hand, is not dependent on
the objects themselves. The text carries the art.
Time and bits opens up a discussion of how to convert
the history of culture to a form that can be in bits.
Shakespeare's works are going to make the cut.
So are *all* written works, because of the nature of writing.
I was lamenting the ephemeral nature of my video tapes
to a poet, and he smiled with self-satisfaction saying,
" Nobody knows my work, but it will be preserved, because
it will just be copied blindly along with all the other
written documents in the Library of Congress."
Right next to Shakespeare.
BTW, show me an original manuscript hand written by
Shakespeare, and I'd get off my high horse. Mark Twain
was convinced that that nearly illiterate writer of
The Will by Will could not have penned King Lear.
I agree most whole heartedly. But this is a debate
only made great by the weight of The Bard's timeless bits.