Useful or Interesting Shakespeare Links
Submitted by bertie on Sun, 10/09/2005 - 07:17
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- This edition of The Oxford Shakespeare at Bartleby's.com includes a search engine that allows you to search The Bard's complete works for any word or phrase. Ideal for checking the exact location of a quote, or for finding out what WS had to say about...whatever. There's one drawback, however. If you enter, say, 'undiscovered country' in the search engine you'll get no result. That's because the word or phrase has to be exactly as it is in The Oxford Shakespeare - in this case, 'undiscover'd country'.
- Titles From Shakespeare gives a generous sampling of the thousands of book and story titles that have been taken from The Bard. Just click on one of Will's titles in the list on the left of the page and go to a page listing titles taken from that play and referencing exactly where in the play they came from.
- No Fear Shakespeare offers us Shakespeare as rewritten in Basic English. Gone is The Bard's poetry, gone is the awe-inspiring vocabulary - all that remains is the most prosaic imaginable translation for the utterly linguistically witless. If there's a bit of Bard you just can't make sense of, by all means come here to find its meaning out - but, for your soul's sake, stay no longer than is absolutely necessary.
Now that's truly fun and helpful. The Oxford more so than the Titles...
If you start a Shakesperian Song Citations list I call dibs on Sting's Sister Moon
"My mistress's eyes are nothing like the sun..." yadda yadda yadda, de do do do, de da da da.
Odysseus, nice to hear from you.
To be honest, Bartleby's, bless 'em, allow you to do the same kind of search with a bunch of other Great Books too, including the King James Bible. Just go to their home page and you'll see.
A Shakespearian Song Citations list. Sounds like a project for someone who's much more into songs than I am. And I wouldn't be surprised if someone, somewhere on the web, has already made one.
Oh dear me. Reading an entire Shakespeare play on 'No Fear Shakespeare' must be mind-numbing. Though admittedly, as you say, it is useful for short phrases you don't understand.
I can't squark too loudly, because I also have been guilty of paraphrasing the plays - and I've done more of the plays than these folks have yet done - but my paraphrases attempt to retain as much of the original as I feel is compatible with the ability of a moderately intelligent present-day reader. Mind you, from what I've read, these folks seem to know Shakespeare quite well, and I have no doubt they have got him right where I have, occasionally, got him wrong. I have yet to find - not that I've read much - anything in their rendering with which I violently disagree, except, as I have indicated, how very drab their language is compared with the original.