Reading Shakespeare is hard sometimes. Not all of us were born in 1600, and about 70% of those who were weren’t even literate – and that’s just the men. So here are useful things that we have found in our journey; we hope they will be useful to you, too.
Links
Open Source Shakespeare:
This site has not only the complete texts of all of the plays but also all the sonnets, a concordance, and facts and figures that you never wondered about in the first place.
Internet Shakespeare Editions:
There is so much stuff here that I really don’t know what to say about it. A somewhat brief exploration on my part revealed statistics about each of the plays (e.g. how many times each character speaks in each scene), a multitude of very short articles about aspects of sixteenth-century life and thought, and a database of modern performances.
Shakespeare Online:
Another all-Shakespeare, all-the-time website. It has facts on most of the plays and poetry, analytical pieces on some of the more popular plays, and some random but quite useful resources like a character name pronunciation guide.
“The Myth of Henry V”:
An article by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto on the BBC’s website about how the presentation of Prince Hal/Henry V in Shakespeare and other stories breaks from the historical reality
Life in Elizabethan England:
By no means a scholarly site, this still has quite a bit of basic information about religion, social class, etc. that applies to Shakespeare’s audience and, for some plays, the world of the text.
Modern Library’s Shakespeare page:
Including some rather annoying but challenging games
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