Related Links
This page has existed in one form or another since this site began, and its purpose has not changed: to point away from here and toward the organisations that actually hold the material. Each description below is drawn from the organisation's own published account of itself. None of them is affiliated with this site.
The texts, free and edited
Folger Shakespeare Library
An independent research library in Washington, D.C. holding the world's largest collection of Shakespeare material, including a very substantial holding of First Folios. It publishes the complete plays and poems in modern edited, line-numbered form for free reading and download, and makes a large part of its collection viewable online. If you need a citable text in a hurry, this is the one to use.
Internet Shakespeare Editions
A long-running scholarly project based at the University of Victoria, presenting peer-reviewed editions alongside old-spelling transcriptions and facsimiles of the early quartos and folios. This is where to go when the question is not what a line means but what it originally looked like on the page, and how editors got from one to the other.
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (MIT)
The oldest Shakespeare site on the web, plain and fast, with the full texts in a single navigable structure. No apparatus and no notes — but for checking the context of a half-remembered line in ten seconds, nothing has improved on it.
Primary material and facsimiles
The Bodleian First Folio
A complete high-resolution digital facsimile of the Bodleian Library's copy of the 1623 First Folio, page by page, free to view. Reading a familiar speech in its original setting — the long s, the compressed spelling, the speech prefixes — is a quick cure for the illusion that these texts arrived finished.
The British Library
The national library of the United Kingdom, holding early printed quartos and a great deal of contemporary documentary material. Its online services have been running in reduced form since a major cyber-attack in 2023, so some collection and digitised-item pages are not currently reachable; the catalogue and the reading rooms remain the route in.
V&A Theatre and Performance Collections
The national collection of the performing arts in the United Kingdom: designs, prints, photographs, playbills and costume. The place to look for how a part was actually staged and dressed, rather than how it reads.
Companies and festivals
Royal Shakespeare Company
Based in Stratford-upon-Avon with a continuing London presence, the RSC produces Shakespeare and new work in repertory and maintains extensive learning resources on the plays and on staging them.
Shakespeare's Globe
A reconstruction of the open-air playhouse on London's Bankside, together with an indoor candlelit playhouse. Its interest for anyone thinking about character is practical: these are the conditions the parts were written for — daylight, a standing audience close enough to touch, and no way to hide.
Oregon Shakespeare Festival
One of the oldest and largest repertory festivals in the United States, running a long season of Shakespeare and other work in Ashland, Oregon. More on the American open-air tradition on the festivals page.
Shakespeare Birthplace Trust
Custodian of the Stratford-upon-Avon properties and of a large documentary and museum collection, with a research library and an active publishing programme.
A note on this list
It is deliberately short. There are hundreds of good Shakespeare resources and a great many bad ones, and a list long enough to be comprehensive is no use to anyone. Everything above is free to consult, institutionally maintained, and unlikely to disappear.