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Shakespeare
Online
The Play's
the Thing
On-line Reading
At the sites listed below, you'll be able to read each of
Shakespeare's works (provided you can stand the eyestrain).
- The
Complete Works of Shakespeare. This is at the MIT server,
so it's pretty quick (for U.S. users). Includes links that allow
you to read the plays online, plus a link to an FTP site so you
can download the plays. It's got a search feature, too, but it's
kind of picky.
- The
Works of the Bard. Based in Australia, it uses the same source
text as the MIT site, but has a much better search
engine. If you're looking to match a quote that you think might
be from one of Shakespeare's works, this is the place to go.
- The
Collected Work of William Shakesepare. This site is interesting
if for no other reason than the way it's laid out. You can view
the plays by category (comedy, tragedy, history), or alphabetically,
or chronologically. It offers a search engine, as well, but it's
not as user-friendly as the Australian site. Still, overall,
this is a very good site.
- The Pasadena
Shakespeare Company. Offers the Complete Works, but two caveats:
one, there's no search feature; two: IT'S IN FRAMES!!! It looks
like they added it just to take up the server space. There's
better places on the Web to read the plays than this.
The first three sites listed above use the Complete Moby®
Shakespeare as their source texts; the Pasadena Shakespeare Company
doesn't list a source text, but I'm guessing it's the same version,
since it is widely available, and, as far as I understand it,
free to use. This is a good version for novice readers, since
it uses modern spellings; a first-time reader might be more intimidated
by the archaic spellings used in earlier versions.
However, in the intrest of completeness, here are a couple
of links to e-texts that are derived from older versions of the
plays:
- Internet
Shakespeare. Maintained by Michael Best at the University
of Victoria, this site has texts from thirty-two plays; some
are from the First or Second Quatro, some are only available
from the First Folio.
- The
Furness Library. Operated by the Schoenberg Center for Electronic
Text & Image (SCETI). Not just transcriptions, like the other
sites, this one presents "virtual facsimilies of original
texts, documents and sources" from the collections at the
University of Pennsylvania. In other words, you click on the
text version you want, click on "load text", and a
new window appears with a "virtual facsimile" of that
text. It's a lot cooler than I'm making it sound. It's as if
you're reading a really old book, minus the musty mildew smell.
Right now, they have loaded five plays online. Note that this
site won't be of much use to you if your browser has a problem
loading images.
I've spent a great deal of time looking, but I can't find
a server based in the U.K.!!! I can't believe that there aren't
any servers hosting Shakespeare in Britain; if you know of one,
please e-mail me at
with the deails.
Downloading Texts
In addition to the link above, you can visit the Shakespeare
page of Project Gutenberg.
Here, you can download full text or zipped files of each of Shakespeare's
plays, most of which are available in more than one version.
You can also download the entire Collected Works, if you want,
but I don't recommend it: it's over 2 MB zipped, 5.3 MB uncompressed,
and about 2042 pages in an unbroken file. I guess it's alright
if you have a couple of dozen inkjet cartridges and a few reams
of paper you're not using, or if you just want it for the sake
of having it. One of the best things about this page is the fact
that it gives you three different options for FTP sites for the
U.S., plus has one at the Univeristy of London in the U.K.
The Plays
Well, I can only speak about the plays I've read. Here they
are:
If you're looking for movies based on Shakespeare, but not
using the actual dialogue, or for parodies or works derived from
Shakespeare, go to The Hollywood Bard. |
