Recommended Shakespeare websites

Jonathan Bate

The most comprehensive (and fully searchable) resource for the advanced study of the plays is the World Shakespeare Bibliography Online (www.worldshakesbib.org/, requires subscription), which provides annotated entries for all important books, articles, book reviews, dissertations, theatrical productions, reviews of productions, audiovisual materials, electronic media, and other scholarly and popular materials related to Shakespeare and published or produced between about 1960 and the present. The scope is international, with coverage extending to more than 118 languages and representing every country in North America, South America, and Europe and nearly every country in the rest of the world. With over 110,000 annotated records, it cites several hundred thousand additional reviews of books, productions, films, and audio recordings.

Faced with such a wealth of resources, where is one to begin?

Probably the best online starting-point is the portal, Mr William Shakespeare and the Internet (shakespeare.palomar.edu/), an annotated guide to resources – texts, contexts and analysis – across the internet. There is also a downloadable internet resources guide on the RSC website (www.rsc.org.uk/content/3935.aspx).

Another valuable portal, with much information on Shakespeare's contemporary theatrical life (with particular but not exclusive UK emphasis), is Touchstone (www.touchstone.bham.ac.uk/).

Links into a vast range of analytic resources can also be found on the websites of various national Shakespeare associations and societies (e.g. www.britishshakespeare.ws/research.php or, for America, www.shakespeareassociation.org/, or for Japan, wwwsoc.nii.ac.jp/sh/sh-english/index-e.html).

It is also possible to become part of the international scholarly Shakespeare debate via the permanent electronic conference, SHAKSPER (www.shaksper.net/). Discussion of the so-called 'authorship' question is not allowed on SHAKSPER. The best online account of the irrefutable evidence that William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon was the author of the plays is The Shakespeare Authorship Page (www.shakespeareauthorship.com/).

The internet also means that it now possible for anyone to view full collections of Shakespeare's original quarto and folio texts, something that until recently was only possible by means of expensive facsimiles. For the quartos, begin at the British Library (www.bl.uk/treasures/shakespeare/homepage.html) and for the folios, go to the Internet Shakespeare Edition facsimile page (ise.uvic.ca/Library/facsimile/index.html).

Thanks to the storage, search and hyperlink capacity provided by digitisation, the next generation of high-level scholarly Shakespeare editions is bound to be electronic. For a glimpse of the future, offering an extraordinary gathering of the riches of the past, see the Internet Shakespeare Edition (ise.uvic.ca/index.html) and, especially, the 'variorum' commentary on Shakespeare's most-talked-about play at Hamletworks (www.hamletworks.org).

The most exciting new resource for the study of Shakespeare's language is the fully searchable collection of dictionaries and glossaries from his age, Lexicons of Early Modern English (leme.library.utoronto.ca/).

Designing Shakespeare is a superb audio-visual website that is especially good for thinking about visual aspects of the plays (www.ahds.ac.uk/performingarts/collections/designing-shakespeare.htm). A comprehensive database of Shakespeare on film, television and radio is in preparation by the British Universities Film and Video Council (www.bufvc.ac.uk/databases/shakespeare/index.html).

Disclaimer: although all the above-named sites are strongly recommended at present, web addresses may change and the longevity and continuing excellence of particular sites can never be guaranteed. Whilst every effort will be made to keep these links up to date, The RSC Edition cannot accept responsibility for broken links or for any failing, such as incorrect or outdated scholarly information, on any external site.

ALL OPINIONS OF WEBSITES MENTIONED ARE THOSE OF JONATHAN BATE, NOT THE RSC OR THE PUBLISHERS OF The RSC Edition.