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:
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 7 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.
Each scene as a separate page: this site does not provide this option. Such pages can be found here at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) or via the who appears where matrices where each column is headed with Act.Scene number which links to the MIT site. 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 147 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.
And 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 to us 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 |