William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare (baptised April 26, 1564 – April 23, 1616) was an English poet and playwright who has a reputation as one of the greatest of all writers in the English language and in Western literature, as well as one of the world's pre-eminent dramatists.

External links For downloading Shakespeare's works

The most widely distributed online version of the text appears to be the early 90s "The Complete Moby? Shakespeare", the base text for which is believed to have been the Stratford Town modern-spelling edition of 1911, edited by Arthur Bullen.

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There appear to be the following versions in the public domain:

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• Versions based Directly on Folio Editions. The University of Virginia library carries versions of The First Folio and Early Quartos editions.
• Versions Based on the 1866 Globe Edition of Clark and Wright.The version at the University of Virginia library, explicitly calls itself the 1866 edition and claims to have been copy checked against its base text.
• Versions based upon "The Complete Moby? Shakespeare". There is no record of how errors in the 1911 base text have been corrected. Complete Moby versions of the plays in html format may be downloaded from MIT. The edition carried at Gutenberg is probably the Moby edition; unfortunately the Gutenberg files only give an indirect indication as to their origin.
• Versions Based on The 1914, W. J. Craig, Oxford Edition. This is carried by bartleby.com but is only given in a form suitable for reading online, a scene at a time.
• The wikisource edition. Probably derived from the Moby edition. This version can be expected to be edited to reflect modern understandings of the text.