recordings
recordings.Following demonstrations of the ‘perfected phonograph’ in 1888, Emile Berliner's gramophone of 1895, and the foundation in 1898 of the London Gramophone Company (subsequently HMV, then EMI), the technology to enable the recording of sound has become increasingly sophisticated. Shakespeare recordings have been in evidence from the earliest days of the wax cylinder, through the short-playing 78 revolutions per minute (rpm) shellac discs of the 1930s and the long-playing 33⅓ rpm vinylite discs (LPs) and reel-to-reel tapes of the 1950s, to the widely available audio-cassettes, compact discs (CDs), videotapes, and digital recordings of the present. The industry of making sound recordings of Shakespeare's works has flourished most visibly in Britain.
The first recordings were concerned rather with registering the voices of actors than with the Shakespeare text as such. Although sequences of just two, then four, minutes, were possible until...
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