24 September 2006 Written by Andrew Eglinton Print This Post  Email This Post

Shakespeare Searched

Shakespeare Searched is a search engine designed to provide quick access to passages from Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets. We cluster search results by topic, work, and character to make it easy to find exactly what you’re looking for. From something as simple as identifying the speaker of a particular quote to discovering underlying thematic elements across works, Shakespeare Searched has you covered. (Source)

‘Shakespeare Searched’ is an excellent resource targeted primarily at students and teachers but also useful to anyone with an interest in Shakespeare. The ‘cluster’ architecture of the site makes it quick and easy to make correlations between plays based on keywords. The search results are grouped into three main sections: Topics, Works, Characters so if you were searching for Scotland-related aspects in the Shakespearean canon, you would find relevant topical entries as well as specific passages from relevant plays and characters that are linked to the keyword ‘Scotland’. This service uses the power of the web to probe every word of Shakespeare’s work and bring it together in a fast, simple and user-friendly package.

Shakespeare’s Complete Works on Google Book Search

Google has been around long enough now to be well-versed in the search engine trade. Using it’s expertise in trawling the Web and collating information, it has launched Google Book search which aspires to become the world’s most extensive online public library. While the concept is noble, the pragmatics appear less attractive. Users must pay a fee to access most books sotred on the database, which to me seems somewhat of a let down, since the idea of joining a public library is usually to benefit from the free loan of books. However there are some interesting exceptions and one of those is Shakespeare’s complete works.

While the Complete Works are available elsewhere online, Google has arranged them in a simple yet compelling form grouping the plays into four categories: Comedy, Tragedy, Romance and History. Google also offers the possibility of searching the works via it’s propietary search engine (although for this time it is less precise in comparison to Shakespeare Searched) and also it has a variety of ‘outreach’ resources such as Google Scholar and Google Video which bring in some interesting theoretical and visual additions to research on Shakespeare.

Note: Please do let me know of any other useful online resources for the study of Shakespeare and I will update this post as and when you inform me. Thanks.