The New Oxford Shakespeare Online comprises the Modern Critical Edition (with modern spelling), the Critical Reference Edition (with original spelling), and the Authorship Companion, integrating all of this material on OUP's high-powered scholarly editions platform. This unique online edition provides the perfect resource for the future of Shakespeare studies.
The Modern Critical Edition gives today's students and playgoers the very best resources they need to understand and enjoy all Shakespeare's works. The authoritative text is accompanied by extensive explanatory and performance notes, and innovative introductory materials which lead the reader into exploring questions about interpretation, textual variants, literary criticism, and performance, for themselves.
The Critical Reference Edition collects the same versions of the same works found in the Modern Critical Edition, keyed to the same line-numbering. But the Critical Reference Edition emphasizes book history and the documentary origins of each text. It preserves the spelling, punctuation, capitalization, abbreviations, typographical contrasts, ambiguities, and inconsistencies of the early documents.
The Authorship Companion accompanies the Modern Critical Edition and the Critical Reference Edition, and concentrates on the issues of canon and chronology—currently the most active and controversial debates in the field of Shakespeare editing. This major new work in attribution studies presents in full the evidence behind the choices made in The Complete Works about which works Shakespeare wrote, in whole or part.
The New Oxford Shakespeare Online allows you to:
- Choose to read either edition, or read both, scrolling alongside each other
- Customize your reading experience and see as many or as few of the different types of notes as you like, alongside the texts
- Personalize the site with your own sets of plays to work within
- Search for words across the whole set of editions, and use the intelligent search to narrow down to just the play texts, or to a specific play, or to scenes written by a particular collaborator
- Compare the edited text with linked images of the early editions
- Navigate straight to any line, using familiar Act, Scene, Line terminology
- Cross-referred passages in the notes are just a click away
Every play and poem has its own digital identifier, and every line its own URL, making citation from The New Oxford Shakespeare Online convenient and easy.
