Shakespeare Festivals and Plays:
- This page on the Shaksper.net website is an impressively comprehensive guide to national and international Shakespeare festivals and theaters.
Websites:
- PlayShakespeare is a vast site that includes the text and background information (synopsis, reviews, and additional documents) for every play; reviews of Shakespeare-related films, theatrical productions, and books; and an extensive discussion forum.
- The Shakespeare Standard is a lively online forum that “seeks to be the center of Shakespeare community and conversation on the web.” Resources range from scholarly articles and reviews of current productions to pop culture news.
- Searchable Shakespeare allows users to perform word, phrase, and character searches throughout all of Shakespeare’s plays and poems simultaneously. It was invaluable to me as I was writing Still Time.
- Shakespeare’s Words, the online companion to David Crystal’s and Ben Crystal’s book Shakespeare’s Words: A Glossary & Language Companion, is another resource I could not have written Still Time without. (For a fuller description of Shakespeare’s Words, see the book annotation below.)
- Folger Library in Washington DC houses the world’s largest Shakespeare collection and is also a world-class Shakespeare theater. Online, it offers much that might be of interest to students, teachers, and scholars.
- Shakesper: Global Electronic Shakespeare Conference is “an edited and moderated international e-mail distribution list for discussion among Shakespearean scholars, researchers, instructors, students, and anyone sharing their academic interests and concerns.”
- The Sonnet Man, aka Devon Glover, is a brilliant rapper who brings Shakespeare’s sonnets and soliloquies to life in exciting new ways.
- Good Tickle Brain: These comics by Mya Gosling are as entertaining as they are insightful.
For Über Geeks
Click on any line in any of the plays on JSTOR: Understanding Shakespeare, and you will instantly get links to all the scholarly articles on the academic digital library JSTOR that reference that particular line. For the right person, this can be an extremely seductive rabbit hole!
Blogs
Bill Walthall, who blogs at The Bill Shakespeare Project is a former high school English, Shakespeare, and Drama teacher. Bill writes engaging posts and creates weekly podcasts about his experience with each of Shakespeare’s plays, from The Comedy of Errors through The Tempest.- KL, the blogger for Bardfilm: The Shakespeare and Film Microblog, shares thoughtful and well-informed responses to “films, plays, and other matters related to Shakespeare.”
Audio
Speak the Speech
Listening to a good reader read Shakespeare aloud can be as powerful an experience as attending a performance. Also, many people encountering Shakespeare for the first time find that following along on the page while a skilled reader reads Shakespeare’s lines aloud can really help those lines come alive. There isn’t an audio version for every play on this site, but those that are available are not only free, but are also very nicely read.- Original Pronunciation
“Original Pronunciation” refers to the accent that the actors during Shakespeare’s time would have used. Linguist and Shakespeare scholar David Crystal and actor Ben Crystal have created this website to explain OP, and let us hear some fascinating samples of Shakespeare’s accent.
More Cool Stuff
- Shakespeare’s World
On this website, volunteers can transcribe handwritten documents by Shakespeare’s contemporaries that will help scholars to understand his life and times. - Shakespeare Geek’s Definitive List of Shakespeare Knock-Knock Jokes
The (Foolish) Authorship Question
- The Shakespeare Authorship Page: Dedicated to the Proposition that Shakespeare Wrote Shakespeare
- 60 Minutes with Shakespeare
This page from the Blogging Shakespeare website is devoted to examining the question of who wrote Shakespeare’s plays. (Answer: a brilliant glover’s son from Stratford-Upon-Avon named William Shakespeare.)