Guides: ENG 456 Shakespeare (Dr. Jennifer Smith): Home

Course Description

“Soul of the Age! The applause! Delight! The Wonder of our Stage”

“He was not of an age but for all times.”

Ben Jonson, Dedicatory Poem for the first edition of Shakespeare’s plays (1623)

This is quite a tribute for a playwright who began his London career as a mere actor and whose earliest printed plays did not acknowledge him as their author. Recently the critic James Pearce praised Shakespeare as writing with “unsurpassed beauty about things that unite humanity across all ages and cultures.” We will seek to discover the culture (historic, religious, literary) that enabled Shakespeare to garner Jonson’s praise in his own time, and we will test Pearce’s assertions with our reading of and research into Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets.

Shakespeare's Texts Online

Folger Digital Texts
High-quality digital texts from the Folger Shakespeare Library editions, completed in 2010 by editors Barbara Mowat and Paul Werstine plus sophisticated coding that works behind the scenes to make the plays easy to read, search, and index
Complete Works of William Shakespeare
The Web's first edition of the Complete Works of William Shakespeare. This site has offered Shakespeare's plays and poetry to the Internet community since 1993.
Shakespeare Online: Sonnets
Full-text of the sonnets and analysis by Amanda Mabillard
Shakespeare in Quarto (British Library)
Twenty-one of Shakespeare’s plays were published in quarto before 1642. They appeared in more than 70 quarto editions, all of which can be seen on this site.
The First Folio (Folger Shakespeare Library)
The First Folio of Shakespeare, published in 1623, is an extraordinary book. About half of Shakespeare's plays had never previously appeared in print, including As You Like It, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, The Tempest, and many more. Without the First Folio, 18 plays might have been lost forever.

The New Oxford Shakespeare: Modern Critical Edition by William Shakespeare; Gary Taylor (Editor); John Jowett (Editor); Terri Bourus (Editor); Gabriel Egan (Editor)
ISBN: 9780199591152
Publication Date: 2016-12-27
The authoritative text is accompanied by extensive explanatory and performance notes, and innovative introductory materials which lead the reader into exploring questions about interpretation, textual variants, literary criticism, and performance, for themselves.The Modern Critical Edition presents the plays and poetry in the order in which Shakespeare wrote them, so that readers can follow the development of his imagination, his engagement with a rapidly evolving culture and theatre, and his relationship to his literary contemporaries.

Watch Plays Online

Digital Theatre Plus This link opens in a new window
Digital Theatre Plus brings live performance into the classroom, accompanied by a range of educational resources for illustration, explanation, and critical reflection. Includes several theatre resources, including over 200 productions, 18 master classes, 27 documentaries, 260 interviews and 62 practical guides.
National Theatre Collection This link opens in a new window
The National Theatre Collection brings the stage to life through access to streaming video of world-class productions and unique archival material offering insight into theatre and performance studies. Through a collaboration with the U.K.'s National Theatre, this collection offers a range of digital performance resources never previously seen outside of the National Theatre’s archive.

Sonnets

The Sonnet Project
The Sonnet Project is a massive multimedia exploration of Shakespeare's great poems. We are creating 154 short films, one for each sonnet. Each video stars a different actor and is filmed at a different iconic or historic location in NYC.

Images

Images in the Folger Shakespeare Library
Founded in 1932, the Folger Shakespeare Library is the world's leading collection of Shakespeareana. Its diverse digital resources are represented in this collection of more than 8,000 images featuring the Bard, and theater in general, through book design and illustrations, manuscripts, costume and stagecraft, portraits of actors, playbills, and miscellanea.