William Shakespeare

The aim of the Internet Shakespear e Editions is to inspire a love of Shakespear e's works in a world-wide audience. To do so, we create and publish works for the student, scholar, actor, and general reader in a form native to the medium of the Internet: scholarly, fully annotated texts of Shakespear e's plays, multimedia exploratio ns of the context of Shakespear e's life and works, and records of his plays in performanc e.

Biographies and literary (prose and/or poetry) works of Henry VIII, Sir Thomas More, John Skelton, Sir Thomas Wyatt, Henry Howard, Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Sir Thomas Hoby, Roger Ascham, John Foxe, Edward de Vere, Elizabeth I, and George Gascoigne.

All the sonnets are provided here, with descriptive commentary attached to each one, giving explanations of difficult and unfamiliar words and phrases, and with a full analysis of any special problems of interpretation which arise. Follow the instructions below to find your way around. Sonnets by other Elizabethan poets are also included, Spenser, Sidney, Drayton and a few other minor authors. The poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt are also given, with both old and modern spelling versions, and with brief notes provided.

These texts are the earliest appearances in print of some of Shakespeare's plays and poems. The spelling, puncuation, and other early modern printing conventions have not been normalized.

On this site you will find the British Library's 93 copies of the 21 plays by William Shakespeare printed in quarto before the theatres were closed in 1642.