Here’s a fairly new website who strives to be something great. Believe you me, they’re on their way. Lots of websites have the complete works online, but they’re all from the same source and have mistakes all over the place. PlayShakespeare.com has people working on these texts to give them a more friendly and scholarly edit to fix these mistakes. It’s a big job and the work has only just begun.
They also have the whole play as printed in the First Folio in modern type. Now you can see the capitalization, spelling, and punctuation as first printed in 1623. It’s a great resource if you don’t want to look through gigantic PDFs of a Facsimile copy of the Folio, or don’t have access to a physical book of the Folio.
My next favorite part of the plays is that they have mouse-over definitions. There aren’t a lot in there yet, but given some time you’ll have a one stop source for text analysis. The site also includes documents of hard to find info on many of the plays, a search feature of everything, and a really great discussion forum where there’s lots of great info posted, and a good place to get some help if you need it.
I could go on, but I’ll let you check it out for yourself. Overall I give PlayShakespeare.com 4 out of 5 Bards for their great resources and potential to be something amazing. If they finish what they started, I will most certainly give them an extra Bard.
