Hamlet - the free, searchable version
Search the Internet Movie Database for Shakespeare and find hundreds of hits about movie versions of his plays
The Shakespearean prose adaptations of Charles and Mary Lamb, first published in 1807, are searchable here.
Searchable Shakespearean Quotations Database
RhymeZone's Shakespeare Search
Search Oxford's Shakespeare works
Macbeth - Free, searchable version
The Early Modern English Dictionaries Database - a free, searchable database
Enfolded Hamlet - Searchable, enfolded texts of the Second Quarto and First Folio
The Tempest - Scene-indexed and searchable HTML of the complete text
The Illustrated Shakespeare - Searchable and browseable
The Tragedy of King Lear - Free, searchable version
Bartlett's Shakespeare quotations - Searchable
Searchable verse by Shakespeare
Shakespeare Concordance - type in a phrase and see what play it came from...perfect from when you know it's Shakespeare but you can't remember which one
Shakespeare's Grammar - a searchable glossary
Taming of the Shrew - Free, searchable version
Cleveland Press Searchable Shakespeare Photographs from the plays (stage, screen, TV, opera and ballet)
The World Shakespeare Bibliography - Online, searchable version
The Annotated Julius Caesar - Free, searchable online version
Search for free online versions of Shakespeare works at Gutenberg.org.
The Merchant of Venice - Free, searchable online version
The Royal Shakespeare Company offers a searchable collection of paintings, photographs, costumes, and prompt books from RSC productions.
Shakespeare Quarterly - Full text is searchable and available online
In Search of Shakespeare - A searchable database of Shakespeare-related educational opportunities in local communities
I should also mention we have all of his works online for free reading at the site I work for. Here are a few of the more popular ones:
http://www.enotes.com/hamlet-text
http://www.enotes.com/othello-text
http://www.enotes.com/macbeth-text
I believe we have all of his works online.
--Joe
Posted by: Joe Stump | October 06, 2005 at 04:37 PM
Searchable Shakespeare is often harder than it sounds. Most folks don't know the exact wording or spelling of what they want to search for. And given that it might change depending on which text you are searching, the task is that much harder.
Having said that, the Ask Sam links above do surprisingly well at it. Usually the search results are pretty liberal - a search of Macbeth for "Lay on, Macduff" has the right answer as #3 result. But if you use too many words it just fails completely. Something like "I will not yield to kiss the ground" returns no matches at all.
Posted by: Duane | October 07, 2005 at 08:37 AM
You missed a site that contains all the works in one handy place. Open Source Shakespeare was built by a friend & former programmer colleague of mine, partly as a master's thesis in an English program. The Advanced Search is particularly whiz-bang, allowing searches by works, characters, genres, date, etc. Phonetic and stemmed word searching are available as well... not perfect, but state-of-the-art anyway, I think.
Someone (Kingsley Amis?) once said that failure to agree that Shakespeare is the finest writer in English of all times marks one clearly as a second-rate individual. Personally, I'm guilty as charged, so perhaps my judgment is not to be trusted---but it's my opinion that the Open Source Shakespeare project is a very fine tool.
Posted by: Michelle | October 07, 2005 at 12:38 PM
New article on Shakespeare's Antony and Orlando's Orlando at orlandoandantony.com
Posted by: Lanfranco De Gasperis | April 03, 2006 at 10:35 AM
I agree with Joe. Searchable is only any good if you know what your are looking for in the first place. Even if you find it what then? When someone needs a quote from one of Shakespeare's plays, it is generally in order to prove an idea they are arguing in an essay. Right?
I am studying English at Edinburgh uni at the moment and me and alot of the guys found that www.shakespearehomework.com is a good place to visit, even just to spark off ideas. We don't agree with all of it. The point is that we get a good sense of the main themes....THEN we look for the quotes
Posted by: Scott | May 05, 2007 at 04:06 PM