Copyright, Sources and Independence

A site that quotes a great deal and illustrates freely owes its readers a plain statement of where the material comes from. This is that statement.

The plays

Shakespeare's works are in the public domain everywhere, and everything quoted here is quoted from that public-domain body of text. Act and scene references follow the standard modern division; where an older edition divides a scene differently, that is noted in the relevant page. Readers who want a citable, line-numbered text will find one published free of charge by the Folger Shakespeare Library, and readers interested in the early printed witnesses behind the modern text should start with the Internet Shakespeare Editions.

Modern editions are a different matter from the plays themselves. An editor's punctuation, emendations, glosses and notes are that editor's work and are protected as such. Nothing on this site reproduces editorial apparatus; quotations are of Shakespeare's words only, kept short, and given in context.

The illustrations

The images on this site are original artwork commissioned for it. They are not reproductions of, and are not intended to resemble, any existing illustration, print, production photograph or design by any other party. Where a page discusses a historical genre of theatrical print — the playbill, the engraved actor portrait — it describes the genre and points to the institutional collections that hold examples, rather than reproducing them.

Writing about real organisations

Several pages here name real theatres, festivals, libraries and museums. Three rules govern how they are described.

Descriptions come from the organisation's own published statements. Where a mission or a fact about a collection is given, it is the organisation's account of itself, not an inference drawn from elsewhere.
No commercial or endorsement claims are made on anyone's behalf. This site does not state or imply that any institution stocks, sells, supplies, sponsors, approves of or is connected with anything published here.
No affiliation is claimed, because none exists. Hotspur Ink is independent of every organisation it names and links to.

What this site is not

It is not a company, a theatre, a shop, a gallery or an educational institution. It sells nothing and takes no orders, bookings or registrations. It is not a primary source and does not present itself as an authority: the authorities are named on the links page and should be preferred over anything written here on any point of fact.

Corrections

Errors of fact are the one thing worth fixing quickly on a site like this, and Shakespeare scholarship is a field in which confident popular claims are frequently wrong — the attribution of doubtful passages, the dating of the plays and the biography in particular. Where this site takes a position on a contested point, it says that the point is contested rather than presenting one side as settled.

Text on this site

The essays and character files are original writing prepared for this site. Quotation for review, teaching and scholarship is expected and welcome; wholesale reproduction is not.