British acting legends Stephen Fry and Vanessa Redgrave are backing a new campaign to make the first volume of Shakespeare's plays available online.
Oxford University's Bodleian Libraries are appealing for donations to digitise the First Folio - the earliest collected edition of the Bard's plays, dating back to around 1623.
Fry described the project as "noble and magnificent".
He said: "First Folio as a phrase sounds so distant from our everyday lives, but this priceless and extraordinary collection of plays turned the world upside down every bit as much as Newton was to do nearly 60 or so years later."
The Sprint for Shakespeare campaign aims to raise £20,000 to put 1,000 pages of the playwright's work online - a cost of around £20 per page.
Once completed, anyone will be able to access the plays, which include Romeo and Juliet and King John, for free, as well as articles and blogs from theatre experts and the general public.
The campaign has won support from a number of thespians, directors and scholars.
Film director and founder of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Sir Peter Hall, said the scheme would "provide an unrivalled opportunity for textual study, not only for actors, directors and other theatre practitioners and their academic colleagues, but also for audiences whose love of the plays has remained undiminished over the centuries".
While copies of the collection are not unique, Bodleian says that their copy is a rarity because it has not been rebound or restored in nearly 400 years.
