Which edition of Shakespeare's plays?

[Hatgirl]

The BBC are on a Shakespeare kick at the moment, and last Saturday showed the first in their "The Hollow Crown" series, filmed adaptations of four of Shakespeare’s best-loved history plays (Richard II, Henry IV parts I & 2 and Henry V).

Their adaptation of Richard II was really marvelous, and I decided I'd pop those four plays into a nicely formatted epub and read them over the coming month, and add said pretty collection into the epub library here

BUT.... there are so many editions! Gutenberg has four versions of Richard II alone, and another in the "complete" collection... and according to wiki the most complete version of Richard II is in The First Folio... but the Gutenberg editions don't seem to list whether the source is Quarto, Folio or an amalgamation...

So... Which of the various (public domain ) online versions do you recommend I use as my source for the four plays?

EDIT: Oops, I posted this in "Workshop" instead of "Upload Help". Mods, if you could move this thread to the appropriate forum that'd be awesome *facepalm*

[Hatgirl]

Right, I've poked about on Gutenberg, and while all of the various versions of Richard II do have the deposition scene, I spotted that many of the versions have at least one typo:
"That bucket down and full of tears am I" is "That bucket down and FUN of tears am I"
(Heh. In context, that's a funny typo. Anyway...)

From a "one typo implies other problems" point of view, that rules out all but two versions:
eText No. 1776 and eText No. 1512.

1776 and 1512 have different stage directions. Ordinarily I'd go with 1776, as its stage directions seem to be from the First Folio edition, but 1776 isn't a standard Gutenberg text. It's presented in conjuction with "World Library, Inc., from their Library of the Future and Shakespeare CDROMS" and is "NEITHER SHAREWARE NOR PUBLIC DOMAIN". The blurb specifically encourages sharing, but there's no mention of whether modification is allowed or proscribed

[Jellby]

As long as you use the text of the play (i.e., not whatever notes or introduction it may have), and you do substantial modifications to the formatting (and "nicely formatted epub" qualifies as that), I'd say you can ignore any copyright or license statement in the file. That is, assuming the text is really the public-domain play we believe it is.

But I am not a lawyer.

[Hatgirl]

Originally Posted by Jellby

As long as you use the text of the play (i.e., not whatever notes or introduction it may have), and you do substantial modifications to the formatting (and "nicely formatted epub" qualifies as that), I'd say you can ignore any copyright or license statement in the file. That is, assuming the text is really the public-domain play we believe it is.

But I am not a lawyer.

I believe Shakespeare can be a bit different than usual because there are a number of different versions of each Shakespeare play (Quaros, Folios etc). When someone edits the versions together (choosing which scenes to include and which versions of the stage directions to use) that version of the play is copyrighted to that company e.g. The Oxfordian Shakespeare.

I've decided to go with the World Library, Inc versions, anyway. And I've actually found quite a few OCR errors

[HarryT]

How are you laying it out? It's always difficult with plays on the narrow screen of a reader. In the edition of Shakespeare's plays I did years ago for the MR library I went for:

CHARACTER NAME
Text....

which I felt made maximum use of the available width. What have you done?

[Hatgirl]

Originally Posted by HarryT

How are you laying it out? It's always difficult with plays on the narrow screen of a reader. In the edition of Shakespeare's plays I did years ago for the MR library I went for:

CHARACTER NAME
Text....

which I felt made maximum use of the available width. What have you done?

Yep, I looked at your versions and thought "That seems sensible"

I've essentially done that, but with added "Line indentation if the line wraps".

So for verse, if whatever font you are using means the sentence wraps, the second line is indented. And prose is treated like a big, long verse sentence...

Eh, it'll make sense when you see it

[HarryT]

That sounds very sensible to me. I look forward to seeing it.

[Hatgirl]

Ta da!
http://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=185633