I have my fingers crossed that I'm posting on the correct thread . . . .
Before I go any further, let me say this: these works are completely
free, under the Creative Commons license (source:
www.logos.com). Second, the website with them may be of interest primarily to Shakespeare students or scholars.
I just ran across something called the Folger Digital Texts. Someone may have posted something about it before, somewhere on MobileRead, but I could not find it after doing a search.
The Folger Digital Texts is of Shakespeare's works. That's it--no one else's works are included. You may be thinking, "Shakespeare's works are all over the Internet; what's the point in posting a website consisting of
them?"
Let me quote from Logos.com:
Shakespeare set the tone for the future of culture and literature, inspiring the subject and themes of Western literature for centuries. But which Shakespeare are you reading? His works have been passed down in various records and editions throughout the centuries—leaving open-ended the question of which is closest to the original. Textual studies on some of the oldest versions have distinguished between the various Quartos (Qq) texts and the collection put together by his colleagues, called the First Folio (F), both surprisingly different in content and language.
In other words, Shakespeare's works have been copied, and shuffled about, and such, so much over the years, that in many situations it is difficult to determine what Shakespeare actually originally wrote and in what form the plays, sonnets, and etc. originally were published. (I have even heard that some of the works attributed to Shakespeare were actually written by
someone else. Christopher Marlowe's name, I think that it is, sometimes comes up as the real author of some).
Well, anyway, the good folks at Folger Digital Texts have come along and tried to put things back, as closely as possible, to the way that The Bard originally wrote and published them.
Folger claims that the texts from the Folger Shakespeare Library editions are the #1 Shakespeare texts in U.S. classrooms.
And, with these texts being produced under the Creative Commons license, you can get "free downloads of the source code--providing the basis for new noncommercial Shakespeare projects and apps."
Here is
the homepage for the Folger Digital Texts. What might be of the most immediate interest, to interested MobileReaders, however, is
this webpage, where the texts for all of Shakespeare's individual works are listed. All of the texts are available for download (you can read them online, too, if you want to) in XML, html, PDF, DOC, and txt formats. There is also a single file shown, at the top of the list, of the complete set of the texts. It, too, may be downloaded in any of the formats that I've listed above.
I do believe that my posting of this, to quote Shakespeare, "is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done." I'm just kidding--Charles Dickens wrote that.
