About Open Source Shakespeare

More than just a collection of texts...

Open Source Shakespeare attempts to be the best free Web site containing Shakespeare's complete works. It is intended for scholars, thespians, and Shakespeare lovers of every kind. OSS includes the 1864 Globe Edition of the complete works, which was the definitive single-volume Shakespeare edition for over a half-century. READ MORE...

Why use Open Source Shakespeare?

This site was built with four attributes in mind: Power, Flexibility, Friendliness, and Openness. You can use the advanced search function, read the plays, and look up words in the concordance.

Who uses Open Source Shakespeare?

From June 2006 to October 2020, Open Source Shakespeare hosted over 20 million visitors, who logged over 87 million page views.

About half of current visitors are from the United States, with the U.K., Canada, Australia, and India rounding out the top five originating countries. OSS receives significant amounts of traffic from non-Western countries such as the Philippines, South Africa, and Pakistan.

Users performed over 15 million searches from September 2012 to August 2020.

See how the site was built, and how it works

Read the paper (part of an M.A. thesis project) describing OSS's construction, as well as a history and analysis of the Globe Edition's texts. Visit this page to see how the database is built and how the texts are moved into the OSS database. Download the source code and database and use it in non-commercial projects of your own.

Questions and suggestions

The site management is always glad to hear from you: mail@opensourceshakespeare.org