About

The Players' Reference Shakespeare is a registered open educational resource (OER) offered under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) license.

It is designed for use in classrooms and rehearsal spaces to teach how Shakespeare's plays function as theatrical scripts and how to use them. It can also be easily printed in whole or in part and used as the basis for full productions, scene rehearsals, or monologue preparation.

While supplying all the background resources typically associated with literary editions (such as textual histories, bibliographies, production histories, and links to related scholarship), Players' Reference editions are also uniquely designed to serve theatrical purposes. They can be displayed in modes intended for reading, literary study, spoken delivery, and preparation/memorization. In the Users' Guide, you can read more about how these modes work and what you can do with them.

A Midsummer Night's Dream, the most produced play in the world and an almost ideal title for learning the fundamentals of Shakespearean performance, is the first title available in this series. Romeo and Juliet will be forthcoming in 2023. On the home page, you can sign up to be notified of updates about these and future titles.

Because this is not a commercial production produced by a large conglomerate, but an independent effort created by educators for other educators and their students, we welcome crowdsourcing to improve the project. Send suggestions for additions or corrections to the editor at kurtdaw@sfsu.edu, including any typos you catch, broken links you encounter, or other errors of content or usability. We would also love to hear your feedback about your experience using the editions.

Kurt Daw, editor

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