This post is for Shakespeare teachers, scholars, lovers...and haters who have to read his plays for school. Yesterday, the Folger Shakespeare Library released Folger Digital Texts, a new collection of twelve of The Bard's plays available online:
- Hamlet
- Julius Caesar
- King Lear
- Macbeth
- The Merchant of Venice
- A Midsummer Night's Dream
- Much Ado About Nothing
- Othello
- Romeo and Juliet
- The Taming of the Shrew
- The Tempest
- Twelfth Night
More texts are coming.
For each of the plays, which are based on "meticulously accurate" editions of the plays, a clean, straightforward interface provides a number of features to facilitate exploration and study of the plays. On the left-hand side of the interface for each play, you can choose a synopsis of the play, a list of the play's characters and a table of contents. On the right, you can quickly navigate through the play, and use full-text search.
Folger has made the source code for these texts available for non-commercial research and usage. To use these texts for your own research, all you have to do is register.
This new resource can expand one's ability to study Shakespeare's plays, and open up the possibility of using these texts in completely new ways.
