I consider these pages my own personal project. But if somehow you have suggestions too for improvement or developments, then please let me know.
Also: if the site in some sort of way has been – or still is – useful to you, then please consider a donation. That will help in maintaining the site and compensate for the many hours of work already done.
If not: ah that’s fine too – you’re welcome anyway.
Thanks!
– Johnny
ALSO: This site is still – and with over a 1000 pages to maintain once finished – may always be “under construction“. Let me know if you come across any errors, links not working etc. so I can repair it.
NAVIGATION: Use the name of the plays at the top to go to the play of your choice. It will give you the scenes and it’s 1st sentences. After that you can go through the play clicking Next or Previous at the end of each scene or follow the links. I tried Search options but it always gave too many options to navigate through the scenes that way, which is why there is no search option on this site. Go to the Folger Shakespeare if you need to search Shakespearé Complete works, or any other site you know of.
FONTS: I edited the text of these pages with the font below (Book Antiqua 14pt), if the text on the pages look out of order then please install them for better presentation. Other fonts were also used now and then but for the text of the scenes I found this font worked best.
SPOTIFY: I used Spotify to add even more audio to this site – next to some Youtube videos here and there. There are other similar streaming services which also may have Shakespeare audio’s but in my region (the Netherlands) this service is most used. If your region doesn’t let you sign up for a (free) account I still hope you find enough on these pages with the other sounds and videos to enjoy.
SOUNDFILES: the drama recordings of these plays are not mine ofcourse, but the work of editing these recordings into scenes – and checking the texts for reading and listening at the same time – it was. If you want to use those scene-recordings (near a 1000 MP3 files in total!) then again, please let me know. You can download the MP3’s on the playlists pages.
The Soundfiles: I didn’t take notes what I was recording (from videos, radio, cassette tapes etc.) the sources of the audios (late 1990s) so cannot in details tell you what sources I used to get these MP3 recordings. I was too busy finding out about Shakespeare myself at that time to be concerned with those details. Most of it is from BBC radio broadcasts or videos.
People may recognise recordings and some may still hold copyrights, but I nevertheless think the quality is in fact so compressed (16bit MP3 – the lowest you can have) it can hardly be called quality audio anymore – can I still hear what they are saying was my goal when editing these MP3s. But it may help exploring Shakespeare – as they did for me – and which was the sole reason why I recorded these audio’s and cut them into scenes (and checked the scene’s text if they would follow the soundrecordings!).
What would Shakespeare himself have done, was my question when I made those recordings available to others also, and I think he would have said, yes do it! It should be about exploring and learning about these Shakespeare plays, and also give some entertainment. For more detailed information about these plays or recordings, please check elsewhere online.
Sources: I used information from several other Shakespeare sites (next to Wikipedia mostly) but always tried to give links to those pages. Also texts & graphics from sources that no longer have any copyright were used (the graphics added were taken from a long out of copyright Shakespeare Complete PDF available on Archive.org), but if by chance you want to let me know about this, that is okay.