Shakespeare Studies   Tags: drama, performance, shakespeare, theatre  

This is a selective guide to some of the many resources available for Shakespeare Studies. This page will be your gateway to books, journal articles, video, and web resources. If you have any problems, just click on the Chat with me link, email me or just stop by my office. I'm here to help!

Here are a few other subject guides that will be of interest to you:

The Global Shakespeares Video & Performance Archive is a collaborative project providing online access to performances of Shakespeare from many parts of the world as well as essays and metadata provided by scholars and educators in the field. The idea that Shakespeare is a global author has taken many forms since the building of the Globe playhouse. Our work honors the fact and demonstrates the diversity of the world-wide reception and production of Shakespeare’s plays in ways that we hope will nourish the remarkable array of new forms of cultural exchange that the digital age has made possible. Global Shakespeares is a participatory multi-centric networked model that offers wide access to international performances that are changing how we understand Shakespeare’s plays and the world.

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Richard III is one of Shakespeare's most notorious characters and his physical remains have finally been found.  Click here to access the story from the NY Times and the accompanying video of the archeological dig to uncover Richard.

The Mousetrap is a place for people to come together to share their love of the plays and poems of William Shakespeare. We are critical omnivores; there is nothing about which we cannot develop a reasoned opinion. But what we love most is sitting around with a glass of wine or a tumbler of bourbon and talking about the Bard. Or sometimes yelling about the Bard. Occasionally fighting about the Bard. And some of us know how to use swords!

But here at The Mousetrap we’re always civil, kind, and respectful, and we never type in all caps. We just want to share the joy and jealousy, the frustration and fascination as we investigate Shakespeare’s life and work. Anyone who wants to join in our exploration is welcome; We’re all here to learn.

myShakespeare has been created to provide a 21st century lens into the world of Shakespeare online.  It invites people from around the world to share their thoughts and experiences of Shakespeare and his work and asks the question ‘How do we interpret Shakespeare today?’.  myShakespeare also includes a gallery, blog and other interesting features including the data visuilisation tool, Banquo.  It shows global, Shakespeare-related social media by the hour, taken from Twitter, Flickr and eBay.  You can use Banquo to find and share information specific to a date or to a Shakespearean play.

The myShakespeare project has been produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company as part of the World Shakespeare Festival.  It runs from 17^th April to November 2012 and is a microsite linked the World Shakespeare Festival website.

Experience Shakespeare's magical comedy through the eyes of the internet over one unmissable midsummer weekend.

From 21 - 23 June, we will be working in partnership with Google Creative Lab to perform A Midsummer Night's Dream, in real time across the weekend.

Visit the RSC website to follow the action, come to Stratford-upon-Avon for live events or be part of the play by joining the Midsummer Night's Dreaming community on Google+.

This will be a ground-breaking digital theatre project, unlike anything you’ve experienced before.

Join us on Google+ to be the first to hear updates as the story happens.

The Comedy of Errors

By William Shakespeare / Directed by Daniel Sullivan

From May 28 through June 30, 2013

Featuring Jesse Tyler Ferguson and Hamish Linklater

​​The sparkling new production of THE COMEDY OF ERRORS concerns two sets of identical twins who were separated as children and now live as master-servant pairs in rival neighboring cities. When one pair crosses the border to find the other, so begins an exquisitely enjoyable mess of mistaken identity, wrongful imprisonment, questionable flirting and general mayhem! The stage is set for a wildly fun evening of physical comedy and brilliant wordplay as this irresistible Shakespearean confection returns to Central Park for the first time in 20 years!

Love's Labour's Lost: A New Musical

Based on the play by William Shakespeare / Directed by Alex Timbers

From July 23 through August 18, 2013

A love letter to Shakespeare in the Park from the creators of Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson.

Romance, revelry and enchanting music ignite in this contemporary yet lovingly faithful musical adaptation of Shakespeare's comedy. The King and his best buds decide at their five-year college reunion to swear off the joys of women. But when four cute, clever girls from their past show up, they’re forced to reconsider all of that nonsense! Smart, sexy, outrageous, and irreverent, LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST is a madcap celebration of true love and coming of age.

​Obie Award winner MICHAEL FRIEDMAN (Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson) and two-time Tony Award nominee ALEX TIMBERS (Peter and the Starcatcher) reunite for this fresh and unexpected evening of song, sonnets and Shakespeare, continuing The Public Theater’s long tradition of premiering new musicals in New York's most magical summer setting.

MACBETH - Direct from acclaimed, sold-out engagements at the National Theatre of Scotland and the Lincoln Center Festival, Tony and Olivier Award winner ("Cabaret") and two-time Emmy nominee ("The Good Wife") Alan Cumming returns to Broadway this spring in a thrilling interpretation of Shakespeare's darkest and most powerful tragedy, MACBETH.  Produced by Ken Davenport, MACBETH will play a strictly limited 73-performance engagement at Broadway's Ethel Barrymore Theatre (243 West 47th Street) from April 3 to June 30, 2013.  A tour-de-force performance directed by Tony Award winner John Tiffany("Once") and Andrew Goldberg ("The Bomb-itty of Errors"), this MACBETH is set in a clinical room deep within a dark psychiatric unit. Cumming is the lone patient, reliving the infamous story and inhabiting each role himself. 

A true tour de force performance, Women of Will, is the masterful summation of Founding Artistic Director Tina Packer’s 40-plus years spent investigating all things Shakespeare, presented in a five-part series. An expansive, thrilling, wholly engrossing look at the female characters in Shakespeare’s plays, Women of Will: The Complete Journey is a triumph of theatre.

 Folger Digital Texts 

Shakespeare's Plays, Cutting-Edge Code
A Powerful Research Tool for Scholars

The Folger is delighted to announce the launch of Folger Digital Texts. These are reliable, expertly edited, and free digital Shakespeare texts for use by researchers. Starting from the Folger Editions of Shakespeare's works edited by Barbara Mowat and Paul Werstine, Folger Digital Texts uses XML to create a highly articulate indexing system. Researchers can read the plays online, download PDFs for offline reading, search a play or the whole corpus, navigate by act, scene, line, or the new Folger Throughline Numbers. In short, every word, space, and piece of punctuation has its own place online. Twelve plays are currently available, and the remainder of the works and poems will be released throughout 2013.

These collections offer access to tens of thousands of high resolution images from the Folger Shakespeare Library, including books, theater memorabilia, manuscripts, art, and more. Users can show multiple images side-by-side, zoom in and out, view cataloging information when available, export thumbnails, and construct permanent URLs linking back to their favorite items or searches.

This database includes the complete text of 11 major editions of Shakespeare's works, from the First Folio to the Cambridge edition of 1863-66. It also includes 24 separate contemporary printings of individual plays, selected apocrypha and related works, and more than 100 adaptations, sequels, and burlesques from the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. It is also an historical archive of Shakespeare editing. The major 18th- and 19th-century editions are included, providing a history of the scholarly foundations of the modern Shakespeare text.

Can you name all the different words in Hamlet's 'To Be Or Not To Be' Soliloquy?

Sporcle games provide mentally stimulating diversions.  Check the site for the many games featuring Shakespeare's plays and test your Shakespearean knowledge!

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In a unique series of six films, Shakespeare Uncovered combines history, biograohy, iconic performances, new analysis, and the personal passions of its celebrated hosts - Ethan Hawke, Jeremy Irons, Derek jacobi, Trevor Nunn, Joely Richardson, and David Tennant - to tell the stories behind the stories if Shakespeare's greatest plays.

Visit the PBS Shakespeare Uncovered page to access full length videos of the series and other related resources.