Comedy	History	Tragedy
All’s Well That Ends Well As You Like It The Comedy of Errors Cymbeline Love’s Labour’s Lost Measure for Measure The Merchant of Venice The Merry Wives of Windsor A Midsummer Night’s Dream Much Ado About Nothing Pericles, Prince of Tyre The Taming of the Shrew The Tempest Troilus and Cressida Twelfth Night Two Gentlemen of Verona The Winter’s Tale	Henry IV, Part 1 Henry IV, Part 2 Henry V Henry VI, Part 1 Henry VI, Part 2 Henry VI, Part 3 Henry VIII King John Richard II Richard III	Antony and Cleopatra Coriolanus Hamlet Julius Caesar King Lear Macbeth Othello Romeo and Juliet Timon of Athens Titus Andronicus
	Poems	Other
	Venus and Adonis Sonnets See also: play counts and character counts.	Arden of Feversham The Changeling Doctor Faustus Double Falsehood Double Falsehood (raw) The Duchess of Malfi The Two Noble Kinsmen Witch of Edmonton Witch of Edmonton (raw)

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 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.

The current state of the file, incorporating countless changes from the 1993 version, can be found here as mobyshak.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. 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 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

   
php file date:  2021 Sep 27  17:09:43