Yeats wrote the play, titled “Love and Death,’’ in 1884, when he was just 18 or 19 years old. The work was hidden among boxes of his journals, notebooks, and correspondence purchased by BC in 1993 from Michael Yeats, the poet’s son.
It languished in obscurity until last year, when university librarian Tom Wall formed a committee to scour the Chestnut Hill institution’s archives for “high impact’’ candidates for digitization - the process by which works on paper are photographed, transcribed, and made accessible by computer.
“We quickly identified this as one that was unique … and had research value,’’ Wall said of “Love and Death’’ during an interview in BC’s John J. Burns Library. “Yeats is a household name, as opposed to other collections we have that are a little more esoteric.’’
As a result, the play will now see (digital) daylight for the first time since it was written 127 years ago. Drawing on the work of a 15-plus-person team that included librarians, archivists, photographers, literary experts, and a dedicated transcriber, Boston College this month published the play online.
The project allows any would-be scholar or Yeats enthusiast with an Internet connection to leaf through the pages of “Love and Death,’’ which spans five notebooks.
The hope, said Jane Morris, BC’s scholarly communication librarian, is to generate new interest and scholarship, such as graduate theses and journal articles, that will add to the body of knowledge on Yeats.
“Before this, if anyone wanted to see it, they had to know about it and come here,’’ Morris said. Now that the play is online, she said, “people will be able to see it in Indonesia. A Yeats scholar in Asia could study it and use it as the basis of new scholarship.’’
Better still, research via the Internet doesn’t pose the risk of damaging the one-of-a-kind manuscript.
“This is it,’’ said Howes. “We have this one copy, and there’s no other extant copy in the world.’’
