Both Philipp Lenssen on Google Blogoscoped and Phil Bradley at SEW Blog have some in-depth comments about a special Google Book Search resource for full text materials (plays) by William Shakespeare. Here’s a quick list of a few, just a few, other sources, many offering full text that the ResourceShelf team compiled.

• Internet Shakespeare Editions, University of Victoria, Canada (Full Text and in some cases full images of pages, Also included, “Shakespeare in Performance is a searchable database of performance materials from over 1000 film and stage productions related to Shakespeare’s works.” Much more)
• The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, (from MIT, online since 1993)
• The Oxford Shakespeare (Searchable by keyword)
• The Perseus Digital Library from Tufts University. Interesting navigation. Also searchable.
• A list of various Shakespeare materials via the wonderful Online Books Page that we’ve been mentioning on ResourceShelf for years. Material from Project Gutenberg is included in this database.
• The Internet Archive offers a bunch of content by and about Shakespeare.
• Shakespeare Bookshelf from IPL

If you’re looking for books about Shakespeare as well as material that William S. authored, we would suggest taking a look at another service that ResourceShelf has been writing about for a long time, ebrary. This company usually sells its services to libraries. However, at this url you can open an account (free) with as little as $5.00. Searching and reading online (full text, full image, no limits) is free. You pay only (money deducted from the account) to print or copy a page (about 25 cents/USD). Over 20,000 books in the Shop ebrary collection. I found hundreds of books about Shakespeare (nice use of hyperlinked cataloging, btw) and 63 books by W.S. himself. More about ebrary here.

Finally, many libraries also offer free full text and full image access to NetLibrary. Many have Shakespeare content in their collections. More about NetLibrary here and here.

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