Shakespeare in the Little Apple
Library Research Guide
The Works of William Shakespeare
Are you looking to study or read the works of William Shakespeare? This list provides a guide to finding the full text of his plays, many of which are available electronically. Sources include K-State Libraries shelves, our digital collections, and the wide world.
Finding the Works Online
Institutions including the Folger Shakespeare Library and MIT have placed the complete text of Shakespeare's plays online for free.
- The Complete Works of William ShakespeareThe Web's first edition of the Complete Works of William Shakespeare. This site has offered Shakespeare's plays and poetry to the Internet community since 1993.
- The First Folio of Shakespeare | World Digital LibraryFlip through a digitized version of copy 68 from the Folger Shakespeare Library's collection of First Folios.
- Folger Digital TextsShakespeare's plays from the Folger Shakespeare Library, home of the world's largest and finest Shakespeare collection.
Examine copies of the First Folio online. Thanks to Internet Shakespeare at the University of Victoria, Canada, you can compare two copies side by side.
The link below is pre-set to compare the pages showing Hamlet's "To be or not to be" speech between a copy from Brandeis University and a copy from New South Wales. This is the same page the First Folio is opened to in the Beach Museum as part of Shakespeare in the Little Apple.
- Facsimile Viewer: First Folio | Internet ShakespeareCompare digitized copies of the First Folio.
Current K-State students, faculty, and staff, and visitors to our campus can access the full text of Shakespeare's plays through these databases.
- HathiTrust Digital Library
Publication Dates Covered: pre-1500-2009 Paid for by K-State Libraries
A preservation repository with millions of volumes digitized by Google, the Internet Archive, and HathiTrust’s partner institutions. Approximately one-third of the volumes are in the public domain and can be viewed in their entirety. K-State faculty, staff, and students who login to HathiTrust with their K-State eID can download full-text PDFs of these public domain works. - EBSCOhost eBook Collection
Paid for by K-State Libraries
Offers thousands of scholarly, reference, and professional full-text books in electronic format. Titles range across virtually all academic areas. Users can search for individual titles or perform full-text searches across multiple titles. Many books may be downloaded for use on portable devices.
Finding Editions in Search It
Locate specific editions of a work through K-State Libraries' Search It.
Enter the title of the work and the editor/edition you need.
Search It groups all editions of a work together. Click on the View X versions link to see all available editions. (Where X equals the number of versions grouped together.)
Editions display with the most recently published first. Click on the Sorted by option above the first record and re-sort by Relevance.
If K-State Libraries owns it, the correct edition will appear first in the search results.
