Prepared in consultation with Samuel Schoenbaum and Jane Donawerth

This exciting resource for the serious Shakespeare scholar offers a unique opportunity to view an extensive collection of original source documents relating to Shakespeare’s life and career. Because the CD-ROM is composed primarily of photographs of the actual documents, the student is able to examine them in a form as close to the original as possible without handling the source documents. Based on about 5,000 pages of manuscripts and printed documents from the 16th and 17th centuries, the disc covers five main sections:

· The Life of Shakespeare

· Shakespeare’s Theatre

· The Social and Intellectual Contexts

· Shakespeare’s Sources

· The Text contains several works in their original form.

Each section breaks down into a variety of subtopics that offer brief descriptions and pictures of the documents, which can be read in close-up or printed. The CD-ROM offers a very useful search function as well, with Shakespeare’s work classified according to key themes (i.e., birth, death, Hamlet, etc.). There is also an index and a word-specific search command. Available for Windows only.