Shakespeare - Helpful Websites

This list of sites is by no means comprehensive; with a little bit of surfing, you will be able to find much more. BE careful; make sure your source has some authority. The web is a morass of redundancies (and often trash) in which it can be hard to find an original, authoritative idea. Please let me know about any problems on this page.

General Resources

・The Folger Library's Shakespeare page has a wonderful wealth of on-line information—look through the links on the upper left under his name. This is a good first go-to site, and you can cite the site as an authoritative source.
・A second top site is Internet Shakespeare Editions from the University of Victoria, with many editions of the plays and guides to life and works.
・On his life, also refer to Peter Holland, "Shakespeare, William (1564–1616)," from the Oxford DNB.
・For substantial reviews of performances, films, and publications, search through news about Shakespeare in The New York Times and The Guardian. You can use these in papers.
・The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, in Stratford, contains many resources on his life and his contemporaries.
・Shakespeare's Globe is the site for the theatre on the south bank in London.
・The Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) has a number of links under "About Shakespeare" and "Education."

Films (SRU Access)

・Academic Video Online includes films from the BBC series, the RSC, and the Stratford Festival, along with a set of other productions. If you're interested, it also includes operas and ballets based on the plays.
・Kanopy includes a number of classic productions.
・Films on Demand includes films by the Stratford Festival and some others as well. Be sure to search by More Filters > All Formats > Full Titles.

Texts on-line

Editors of virtually all modern editions regularize the text to modern grammar and spelling, so some aspects of EME language (some punctuation, spelling variations, use of the long ſ [s], and so on) will be elided in them. Usually this isn't a problem. If you need to see the original, though, you can download facsimiles of the First Folio for free from the Folger Library as .pdfs (do it in parts—they are huge files). This page also includes images of quartos and later. Also see the Shakespeare Quartos Archive for many more of these earlier and often very irregular versions of the plays that preceded the Folio.

NOTE: all editions number lines differently, use different spellings, and even separate scenes differently. So, if you use an on-line source, you may have to look a few lines ahead or behind to find the same lines in our Bedford.

Shakespeare's plays and poems: ・Open Source Shakespeare. A well-done site with advanced search features. The site includes a separate concordance. Try this one first. It allows you to search all of the plays at once.; ・The Works at MIT. Easy to use; search one play at at time with your browser's "Find" command.; ・The Internet Shakespeare Editions. This site from the University of Victoria has the best collection of Shakespeare's texts online.

☞ If you are in my Historical Development of the English Language class, you must quote in your papers the "old spelling transcription" of the 1623 First Folio from this website. Find them in the "Foyer." You may need to find examples through another site's concordance. Watch for punctuation as well as spelling.

Other early modern writings: ・The Perseus Project's Renaissance collection includes many Renaissance texts and glossaries of Shakespeare's vocabulary along with digital versions of Shakespeare's works.; ・Early Modern English Drama from the Folger library is a digital anthology of early modern dramatic works beyond Shakespeare.; ・The Holinshed Project is an on-line edition of one of Shakespeare's favorite sources, not just for history plays but also plays including Macbeth, Cymbeline, and others.; ・The 1611 King James Bible gives the original text of the Bible and links to other contemporary texts and modern tools.

Nifty Blogs and Podcasts

・The Shakespeare Unlimited podcast from the Folger Library talks about a wide set of topics, from the plays themselves to Shakespeare's appearances in modern culture. They are not too long, either: about 30-45 minutes, just right for a drive to school. :) You can use these in papers.
・Shakespeare for All includes not just a podcast but also resources for further work.