Screen-friendly and Kindle-friendly versions
and who appears where matrices
for Shakespeare plays
What's here. Each play name above gives access to a “play reading” version and the who appears where matrix.
Play reading versions. These texts are optimised for narrow windows and use in play reading meetings:
- The text itself is allowed to occupy the full width of the window. Character names and stage directions are indented.
- There is a table of contents at the start linking to each scene and the start of each scene links back to the table of contents.
- Each speech is marked with Act.Scene.Line_number_within_scene
You can simply open the text here in your browser, download it for offline use or modification, or you can email it to your Kindle.
Errors. I have been using these texts twice a month for the last 10 years and many errors have been found and corrected. But there are probably more. So if you find errors, please let me know at waw@RHaworth.net and I will correct simple typos promptly and be willing to consider changes arising from variations between editions.
Source. The matrices and the texts are all derived from the Moby Shakespeare created by Grady Ward circa 1993 and released into the public domain. It was released as a single 5½ Mbyte file but finding it in this state on the web is very difficult. The copy I found at icon.shef.ac.uk has disappeared but it is preserved on this site in the 1993originals directory and embedded in this archive file on the WayBack Machine.
The current state of the file, incorporating countless changes from the 1993 version, can be found here as sscrpts.txt . This file is scanned every time the text or who appears where matrix is requested.
Each scene as a separate page: this site does not provide this option.
Instead links are provided in both directions between a list of scenes at the start and
the start of each scene.
Each scene as a separate page can be found here
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). But beware! Almost all the errors that I
have corrected in the Moby original are still there at MIT. For example: try finding
Henry IV, part 1, Act 3, Scene 3 on MIT.
In case they disappear from the MIT site, these texts are preserved here.
Why? I belong to a group called the Sunday Shakespeare Society which meets once a month to simply read a Shakespeare play. Locating a slim version of each play in public libraries proved to be a small problem. So I became the first person in the society’s 150 year history to read their part from a tablet computer.
That threw up another problem - I was afraid that one swipe of my finger could scroll the text by two or three scenes and getting back to the right place could be a lot harder on screen than with a book which has act and scene number in the heading of each page. Hence the provision of Act.Scene.Line_number_within_scene against each speech.
And as if one society was not enough, I also joined the Shakespeare Reading Society which is younger than the Sunday Shakespeare Society by just one year. I also switched to using a Kindle where having the text fill the full width of the screen is invaluable.
Another benefit of these scripts emerged in 2020 when COVID-19 forced us to meet online. The user could have the script in one window at one side of their screen and the Zoom meeting filling the rest of the screen as in this example.
Queries / complaints - to Roger W. Haworth
| - email: waw@RHaworth.net - website: RHaworth.net |
Normal parameters plus &txf=filename - filename will be scanned
for the play specified by the &cd parameter. Error message if not found
Normal parameters except cd present but with no value thus
&cd&txf=filename - filename will be scanned for a play and
the first one found will be used.
php file date: 2023 Sep 14 11:32:38