Explore The Arden Shakespeare Third Series of 42 plays alongside the landmark five-volume The Arden Encyclopedia of Shakespeare’s Language in this comprehensive digital guide to Shakespeare’s dramatic works. Seamlessly look up meanings of words in the Encyclopedia whilst reading a world-leading Arden Shakespeare edition of a play. Navigate between the play texts and accessible, evidence-based accounts of Shakespeare’s words for a richer understanding of the plays and the period in which they were first written and performed.

Content Highlights

About the plays: The Arden Shakespeare Third Series

• This 'gold standard' series offers modernized texts with comprehensive commentary notes glossing meanings, discussing staging issues and explaining literary allusions.
• Each play includes a lengthy, illustrated introduction by a leading scholar exploring the play's critical, theatrical and historical contexts.
• Each year, from 2026, a small number of new Arden Shakespeare Fourth Series editions will be added to The Arden Shakespeare Play Collection: Text and Language until eventually the entire series has been incorporated.

About the Encyclopedia: The Arden Encyclopedia of Shakespeare’s Language

• At the launch of The Arden Shakespeare Play Collection: Text and Language, the encyclopedia comprises four major volumes that bring scholarship on Shakespeare's language fully into the 21st-century by illuminating Shakespeare's rich language through the tools of corpus linguistics and computational analysis.
  • Volumes 1 and 2 offer a dictionary style analysis of the meanings of Shakespeare’s words to examine what Shakespeare’s words actually do in the environments they inhabit.
  • Volume 3 is the first work to detail the linguistic thumbprints that characterize every play and every character within them.
  • Volume 4 is the first work to visually plot, explore and compare the formation of social communities through dialogue in all of Shakespeare’s plays.
• In 2027, The Arden Encyclopedia of Shakespeare’s Language: Semantic Fields and Themes (Volume 5) will be added via an optional update to The Arden Shakespeare Play Collection: Text and Language.