Four years ago, linguist David Crystal and his actor son Ben Crystal created a subscription website to accompany and expand upon their Shakespeare glossary, “Shakespeare’s Words.” Because of space limitations, the book was able to include no more than six quotations from the plays/poems to illustrate each of the words and senses contained in the glossary. The website contains all relevant quotations for each word and sense - around 50,000 in total. It also includes a fully searchable text of the plays and poems, so that any word or string of words can be found.
A new publisher recently took over management of the site and eliminated the subscription fee, making the search engines free for individual users. Regular users are encouraged to make donations to pay for the site maintenance and institutions such as schools are colleges are still required to pay an annual subscription fee to use the site
Below is a statement from the new publisher, Language Plus, with details about the changes:
When David and Ben Crystal devised the website of Shakespeare’s Words in 2004, they passed the management over to the division of a company, Crystal Reference, which was handling the production of all David’s encyclopedia publications. This division ceased to trade this year, so they have had to institute an alternative management system to ensure continuity with those using the Shakespeare’s Words site.
Apart from the new look, they have completely rebuilt the engine that drives the site, in the light of their own usage of it over the past four years, and taking into account comments and suggestions they had received from other users. It is now faster and more user-friendly, and several new functions have been added:
*The biggest change is that they have decided to eliminate the subscription for individual users, so there will no longer be a log-in requirement. This has been a ‘fingers-crossed’ decision. The new site was quite expensive to build, and there will be annual maintenance costs, so they hope that individual users who find the site valuable and who use it regularly will wish to make an occasional donation to ensure that the site stays live, using the Paypal system.
*You will now be able to search the entire database at the same time — that is, the A-Z section, the various panels, the thematic lists of proper names at the end of the book, and the other additional material (such as the preface and dramatis personae). Previously, these elements were held separately on the website and had to be searched separately. A new style of presentation clearly distinguishes results belonging to these different elements.
*You will be able to do range searching in individual plays in Advanced Search. For example, if you want to find whether ‘good’ is used in the vicinity of ‘lord’ in Hamlet, you can now find this combination within 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 lines.
*In addition to searching within individual plays, poems, or groups of plays and poems, you will be able to search separately for usage within individual characters, within all male vs female characters, within scene directions, and within prologues and epilogues.
*Sonnets can also be searched in any combination.
*There is greater search flexibility in the Special Features tables.
Schools, colleges, and other institutions that wish to use this website for teaching purposes or public presentations need to make an annual subscription.
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