The Arden Shakespeare Play Collection: Text and Language
Explore The Arden Shakespeare Third Series of 42 plays (and the Fourth Series plays as they publish) 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.
About the plays: The Arden Shakespeare Third Series and Fourth 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. The Fourth Series editions of Julius Caesar and Titus Andronicus have now been added to this collection. The new Fourth Series in-depth introductions and on-page notes dive deeper into themes of performance, gender, sexuality and race in Shakespeare’s works and world, highlighting these critical issues for today’s students. A new Short Notes feature, ideal for undergraduates, is also provided for these Fourth Series editions on Drama Online.
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.
