‘Tis true: there’s magic in the web of it…”
Othello, III.iv
Quartos.
Folios.
Textual variants.
Conflicting versions.
Competing editions.
Authorship questions.
Given the maze that is the textual history of the works of William Shakespeare, I love the fact that the Internet has become home to a hyper-textual labyrinth of so many high-quality Shakespearean resources.
I’ve never been one to sweat a folio versus a quarto, or a Stratfordian versus Oxfordian versus Baconian author. Whatever. I just like the plays. I love the language. I also like to geek out when I find some new online version or digital tool about the Bard, going all the way back to the early days of the Internet with MIT’s Complete Works, or the original digitized Shakespeare Insult Kit. (Still a hit with the high school crowd, I’m happy to report).
More recently, I’ve been using the Folger Library’s excellent Folger Digital Texts, which are a lifesaver when you realize you forgot your own copy of the book in the middle of teaching Midsummer, or just when you want an easy, clean way of putting a passage from Hamlet on the screen for the class to look at together.
Then just last week, I thought, “There must be an easy way to search for every instance of a word in the complete works of Shakespeare.” Turns out there is, and it’s called Open Source Shakespeare, which has a nifty search engine that does exactly that. At the time, I was looking for title ideas for a new sci-fi story (the word “device” appears 53 times in Shakespeare, as it turns out), and just now, I used it to find the quote at the top of this post (“web” appears 12 times). Check it out, nerds. Sorry about making you stay up past your bedtime.
I’m sure there are more. Even in the process of searching for the image I used in this post, I discovered Internet Shakespeare Editions. There goes my night.
What are your favorite online Shakespeare resources? Share in the comments! I’d love to know.