Shakespeare resources

Contents:
Major Shakespeare websites Editions of Shakespeare's works Shakespeare concordances	Shakespeare's language Reference works Shakespeare: Bibliography	Shakespeare journals online Shakespeare discussion groups Bookshop

Major Shakespeare websites

Shakespeare: Gateways: A valuable collection of sites of interest. The author, Michael Best, at the University of Victoria, is a noted Shakespeare scholar and an alumnus of the University of Adelaide.
Mr. William Shakespeare and the Internet: This site aims "to be a complete annotated guide to the Shakespeare resources available on the Internet". It is a very rich and comprehensive resource which is always up to date. Highly recommended!
Absolute Shakespeare: An excellent and comprehensive site with links to information about Shakespeare, the texts, a glossary, study guides to individual plays, information about the Globe theatre and much more.
There is a page of links to articles on Shakespeare and film as well as a chronological compilation of the most notable film adaptations of Shakespeare.
Yahoo Shakespeare: Shakespeare links divided by categories. Because this is a Yahoo page, it is constantly updated.
Folger Shakespeare Library: The Folger Shakespeare Library is an independent research library and a major center for scholarly research The Folger houses the world's largest collection of Shakespeare's printed works, in addition to a magnificent collection of other rare Renaissance books and manuscripts on all disciplines--history and politics, theology and exploration, law and the arts. The collection consists of approximately 280,000 books and manuscripts; 27,000 paintings, drawings, engravings and prints; and musical instruments, costumes and films.
Illustrated Shakespeare, 1826-1919: 'This online collection of selected electronic facsimiles seeks to share with a wider audience meetings of book art and Shakespearean text, and suggests the variety of responses of visual and book artists to the stimulus of Shakespeare's words. This online collection of 12 works, originally published in venues as distant as Philadelphia and Leipzig, includes images produced by an array of technologies available in the 19th and early 20th century'.
Hosted by the University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries, the site is searchable and browsable. Enjoy!
The Shakespeare Art Museum: Features the writings and visual works on Shakespearean themes of Hannah Tompkins. The site has an excellent and comprehensive page of Links to other sites (including my own) on Shakespeare.

Editions of Shakespeare's works

Internet Shakespeare Editions

The aim of the Internet Shakespeare Editions is to make scholarly, fully annotated texts of Shakespeare's plays available in a form native to the medium of the Internet.
The initial aim will be to produce generally conservative texts with an emphasis on readability and accessibility, though there will be some flexibility in editorial approaches. Since electronic or graphic versions of the original Folio and Quartos (where relevant) will also be provided, the modern edition can at any time be compared with the texts from which it is generated.
Electronic versions of the Folio and relevant Quartos are available in a variety of formats: Text only, in a readable format; Text in HTML format for access as formatted text on the World Wide Web; Text tagged in SGML; .pdf graphic files.

William Shakespeare on Bartleby.com

A searchable collection of Shakespeare sources, including:

The Oxford Shakespeare: the 37 plays, 154 sonnets and miscellaneous verse
Bartlett's Shakespeare Quotations: over 1500 quotations from all of Shakespeare's plays and many poems
Anthologized Verse: 74 verse selections from Shakespeare's poems and plays
Lamb, Charles and Mary: Tales from Shakespeare

The Shakespeare Collection

The complete works: 37 plays, 154 sonnets and sundry other poems. The works form part of our own e-texts collection, eBooks@Adelaide maintained by Steve Thomas, which you can read, print or download.

The Shakespeare Collection

Here's a wonderful resource; the Rare Book Room site has been constructed as an educational site intended to allow the visitor to examine and read some of the great books of the world. Over the last ten years, a company called Octavo has digitally photographed some of the world's great books from some of the greatest libraries. These books were photographed at very high resolution (in some cases at over 200 megabytes per page).
The Shakespeare collection is sumptuous: included are most of the Quartos from the British Library, the Bodleian Library, the University of Edinburgh Library, and the National Library of Scotland as well as the First Folio from the Folger Shakespeare Library. Simply scroll down to Shakespeare under Find by Authors.

Shakespeare concordances

The works of the Bard: Search for single words or phrases occurring in Shakespeare's plays and poems with this powerful search engine (in effect, a concordance). This site has been maintained by James Matthew Farrow in Sydney, Australia since 1993.

Shakespeare Concordance: Locate the occurrence of any word, or combination of words, in context, in any of Shakespeare's plays or the Sonnets.

Open Source Shakespeare

"An experiment in literary technology", this website features a Concordance with keyword and advanced keyword search options. You can limit your search to a particular play, character or genre (e.g. comedy)

WordHoard: An application for the close reading and scholarly analysis of deeply tagged texts. The WordHoard project is named after an Old English phrase for the verbal treasure 'unlocked' by a wise speaker. It applies to highly canonical literary texts the insights and techniques of corpus linguistics, that is to say, the empirical and computer-assisted study of large bodies of written texts or transcribed speech. In the WordHoard environment, such texts are annotated or tagged by morphological, lexical, prosodic, and narratological criteria. They are mediated through a 'digital page' or user interface that lets scholarly but non-technical users explore the greatly increased query potential of textual data kept in such a form.
It is a basic assumption of WordHoard that new kinds of historical, literary, or broadly cultural analysis will be supported through the forms of data access that are made possible when literary texts are treated in the manner of linguistic corpora. Deeply tagged corpora of course support more finely grained inquiries at a verbal or stylistic level. But more importantly, access to the words of a text at such microscopic levels also lets you look in new ways at the imaginative worlds created by those words.
In its current release WordHoard contains the entire canon of Early Greek epic in the original and in translation, as well as all of Chaucer and Shakespeare, as well as Spenser's Shepheardes Calendar and Faerie Queene.

Most of the Shakespeare full-text sites that I have listed in the Editions of Shakespeare's works section of this page will include a search engine which you can use as a concordance.

Print concordance

There is an excellent printed concordance in the Barr Smith Library:

Spevack, Marvin: The Harvard concordance to Shakespeare.
Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1973.
Barr Smith Reference collection Call number: 822.33 ZS752 1973

Shakespeare's language

The Language of Shakespeare: A brief introduction with a link to an excellent page on Shakespeare's grammar. Also includes a list of links to other relevant sites.
Elizabethan English as a literary medium: From the Bartleby.com online version of the Cambridge History of English and American Literature.
English handwriting 1500-1700: An online course with a useful introduction and a large number of manuscript images.

We have a good collection of books in the Library on Shakespeare's language. To see what is available search the Library Catalogue under the Subject Heading Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616--Language and the subheadings.

Reference works

The Barr Smith Library has an excellent and very comprehensive collection of Shakespeare material that has been built up from the very first days of teaching at the University of Adelaide. Thanks to the interest of scholars such as Dr Alan Brissenden, Honorary Visiting Research Fellow in the University's Discipline of English, we continue to add newly-published material to the collection.
The Dewey Decimal Classification system, by which the Library's collections are arranged, has an individual number, 822.33, assigned to Shakespeare. At that number you'll find collected and individual works and Shakespeare criticism of all sorts. Use the Library Catalogue to find precisely what you are looking for. For works about the playwright or individual titles search the Catalogue under the Subject Heading Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616 and then select an appropriate subheading. You can look for critical works on an individual title such as Hamlet or books about the life of Shakespeare. For general critical works on Shakespeare use the Subject Heading Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616--Criticism and interpretation.

Some of the more useful guides to Shakespeare are at Dewey Classification number 822.33 in the Barr Smith Library's Reference collection on Level 3 South.

Shakespeare: Bibliography

World Shakespeare Bibliography: This invaluable resource is issued every year as part of Shakespeare quarterly. We have a complete set of paper copies of Shakespeare quarterly from vol. 1 (1950) to date, at call number 822.3305 S522. We also have online access to volumes 1-31, 1950-1981, including the Bibliography, through JSTOR; unfortunately, the Bibliography for 1982 onwards is not included in our JSTOR and Project Muse online subscriptions.
I'm trying to get funding for online access to World Shakespeare Bibliography, but so far without success...
William Shakespeare Bibliography: Details the most universally accepted bibliography of Shakespeare's works. 'Presented here is the most accurate account possible based on all available evidence, records and anecdotes. Where there is confusion, dates and venues are described as estimates.'

There are many other Shakespeare bibliographies in the Barr Smith Library collections: to find out what is available search the Library Catalogue under the Subject Heading Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616--Bibliography.

Shakespeare journals online

Shakespeare Quarterly: Founded in 1950 by the Shakespeare Association of America, Shakespeare Quarterly is a refereed journal committed to publishing articles in the vanguard of Shakespeare studies, notes that bring to light new information on Shakespeare and his age, issue and exchange sections for the latest ideas and controversies, theater reviews of significant Shakespeare productions, and book reviews to keep its readers current with Shakespeare criticism and scholarship.
Issue number 5 each year is the World Shakespeare Bibliography.
We have online access to issues from 1950 to 2000 through JSTOR and to 2000 onwards through Project Muse; (note that the World Shakespeare Bibliography is available on JSTOR for volumes 1-31, 1950-1981 only; the Bibliography for 1982 onwards is not included in JSTOR and Project Muse). We also have a complete set of paper copies from vol. 1 (1950) to date, at call number 822.3305 S522.
Early Modern Literary Studies: Early Modern Literary Studies: a Journal of Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century English Literature is a refereed journal in electronic form which serves both as a formal arena for scholarly discussion and as an academic resource for researchers. Articles in EMLS examine English literature, literary culture, and language during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; responses to published papers are also published as part of a Readers' Forum. Reviews evaluate recent work as well as academic tools of interest to scholars in the field. EMLS is committed to gathering and to maintaining links to the most useful and comprehensive internet resources for Renaissance scholars, including archives, electronic texts, discussion groups, and beyond.
The Shakespeare coverage is very good.

Shakespeare discussion groups

Shaksper: SHAKSPER is the international electronic conference for Shakespearean researchers, instructors, students, and those who share their academic interests and concerns. It offers the opportunity for the formal exchange of ideas through queries and responses regarding literary, critical, textual, theoretical, and performative topics and issues. Announcements of conferences, of calls for papers, of seminars, of lectures, of symposia, of job openings, of the publication of books, of the availability of online and print articles, of Internet databases and resources, of journal contents, of festivals, and of academic programs of study are a regular features as are reviews of scholarly books, of past and present theatrical productions, and of Shakespeare and Shakespeare-inspired films -- in addition to popular culture references to Shakespeare or his works. SHAKSPER is a moderated mailing list.
You can search the complete archives (from vol. 1, 1990).

If you want to find other discussion groups please visit my separate page News and discussion groups and mailing lists for English literature topics.

Bookshop

book&volume: book&volume is an Australian bookseller with a focus on classic English literature of the Elizabethan and early Jacobean periods - and the periods themselves. A large part of the titles they list deal with Shakespeare.
book&volume is primarily a virtual bookshop, but they claim to physically stock a goodly number of the books listed on their website.