The Google Shakespeare
Users of Google Book Search should not take long in discovering what I will call "The Google Shakespeare." Its formal title is "The complete plays of Shakespeare. Now at your fingertips," and is located at:http://books.google.com/googlebooks/shakespeare/
It presents the canonical 37 plays categorized on tabs into Comedies, Tragedies, Romances and Histories. None of the questionable collaborations or other apocryphal plays are presented. Each play is linked into a full text edition scanned as part of the Google Books (or Google Library) projects. They are taken from various public domain (nineteenth century) editions. A representative or curious quote is given below the title of each play, followed by an "All editions" link which will link to all single volume editions of the play that have been scanned into the Google Book Search project, some of which are interesting choices indeed.
A note below the listing of plays indicates that it is a work in progress: "Note that some print versions of Shakespeare's plays may not be in the public domain everywhere in the world. Where copyright status is in question, the publication will not appear in Full Book View. We hope you bear with us as we confirm the status and, whenever appropriate, change the display." In fact, among the limited view items you will find current Signet and other well known editions. But more on the linked editions below.
Also below the listing of plays you will find several very useful links featuring the various search tools developed by Google, each pre-configured with Shakespeare as a search argument. They include a Shakespeare web search, a Google Scholar search, a search of Google Groups, a search for Shakespeare themed Google videos, a search on images related to Shakespeare, and, my favorite, a Google news search which extracts the latest news stories that mention Shakespeare.
As a bonus, a sidebar contains a Google Earth field trip to Shakespeare's Globe and other Shakespearean landmarks.
As grateful as I am for these resources, they are not presented without flaws, or at least without the features I would like, to put it more generously. A definite flaw is the quality of the scans, in some cases. It is poor, making onscreen reading difficult. The PDF download link for each play results in downloading the Complete Works volume within which the plays reside, which means a lengthy download depending, of course, on your connection speed. If there was a guiding principle on choosing which Complete Works edition to select individual plays from, it is not apparent, meaning that you will have to download several in their entirety. I found several, including:
- a J. Payne Collier (1853 - from which the majority of plays are taken);
- a Barry Cornwall (1843 - illustrated rather nicely, I think, by Kenny Meadows);
- an anonymous 1844 complete works;
- an 1859 Romeo and Juliet, with notes by Dr. Otto Fiebig, scanned from the Harvard library and originally purchased, its charming bookplate informs us, by income from the bequest of Ichabod Tucker, class of 1791;
- an 1824 G. H. Davidson Cymbeline;
- an 1860 stand-alone King Lear, whose bibliographic entry (you find the bibliographies--in various formats--by clicking the "Find this book in a library" link on th "About this book" page, and then clicking "Cite this item" link from the resulting OCLC worldcat.org page) reads "Edwin Forrest edition of Shakespearian and other plays, no. 3" but whose scanned front matter advertisement insists that it is number 1 of the same series--what mysteries lie herein?;
- an 1889 Richard Grant White edition of The Winter's Tale and Henry VI parts 1 and 2 (but not 3!), "The works of William Shakespeare : the plays ed. from the folio of 1628, with various readings from all the editions and all the commentators, notes, introductory remarks, a historical sketch of the text, an account of the rise and progress of the English drama, a memoir of the poet, and an essay upon the genius";
And so on... The point is, various editions are used. Access to the other editions is, of course, easy from the "About this book" page, which each book in the Google Book project has.
Since the majority of the plays presented are taken from the Collier edition, it is particularly unfortunate (and also practically inexplicable) that it does not have a corresponding downloadable PDF version, as most of the other volumes do. It is also unfortunate that the text, on some pages, is somewhat faint--though certainly still readable. It is inevitable that two-column layout is the dominant mode because the works are taken from complete work volumes, for the most part, and publishers have ever chosen this format to save paper. It is a pity single volume single column layouts could not have been found for each of the works, as they were for Romeo and Juliet and King Lear. In fact, among the "all editions" linked for The Tempest is such an edition, an 1872 Rolfe stand-alone, single column work, which has its own downloadable PDF.
Do take the time to explore the "All editions" link beneath each play. Many of the other "editions" are in fact volumes of critical essays, available nowhere else on the web. There are also so truly odd items included among the other editions, but I will leave that to the reader to discover.
I feel more than a little guilty complaining about these things, and hope that the editors at Google, if they ever see this, do not take it amiss. I am truly grateful for this focused presentation, and consider it to be a boon to Shakespeare studies. I offer these criticisms in the hope that it can be made even better. We can always hope that our gift horses could run a little faster.
Because of the variations in source
plays and apparent uncritical approach
to inclusion I am rating this site at
three-and-a-half diamonds.
