Going back over 70 years, the BBC Shakespeare Archive is exactly what it says, a digital trove of pretty much everything Shakespeare-related ever made by the BBC.
In total, the collection holds almost 1,500 assets, neatly broken down into four categories: Plays; sonnets and poems; factual; and entertainment. With the first two categories, you find a list of play or poem titles, which you then click through to find relevant content. The factual category contains more generic content pertaining to the Bard and the entertainment page includes full-length comedy shows which have skewered Shakespeare and his tropes, such as Monty Python, Blackadder, Morecambe and Wise. One of the more interesting aspects was seeing 40-to 50-year-old documentaries lamenting the decline of Shakespeare, the dearth of audiences and how modern interpretations are killing the industry.
Of the content I watched, it all seems to stream well with as good a sound and picture quality as one can expect from an era where a lack of home video meant that posterity wasn't a concern to many. That this much has survived to be digitised is impressive enough. The lack of polish on many of the earlier plays might make them difficult fare for an inattentive class to sit through – better to spend some time preparing beforehand and making a note of where to start watching a particular scene to study.
Unlike iPlayer, you cannot download the media for use offline, which means that you need to ensure that you have a good internet connection if you're intending to stream in class. Ostensibly, this seeks to protect the content but as an archive aimed solely at educational institutions, it ignores the issues that many schools have regarding internet infrastructure. Considering that such functionality is already available with iPlayer, and that the archive's media player looks very similar to iPlayer, this should be the logical next step if the BBC want to increase use of the archive.
Otherwise, this archive has limitless potential for use in the classroom. It helps with teaching not just Shakespeare itself but the process of adaptation, the history of televised theatre and that Shakespeare needn't always be taken so seriously. This would be perfect if the more recent archive was also freely available – thumbnails tantalise you with pictures of modern stars such as Damian Lewis, Billie Piper and David Tennant but they only appear in production images, with the productions themselves nowhere to be seen.
Access to the archive can be requested at shakespeare.ch.bbc.co.uk