Help for advanced searches
Search type
DEFAULT: All or part of keyword
All or part of keyword
EXAMPLE: searching for play will return lines containing plays, played, display, playfellow, etc.
HOW IT WORKS: If your keyword is found at the beginning, middle, or end of a word within a line, the search will return the line.
WHEN YOU SHOULD USE IT: This is the quickest way to search, but it's less exact; that being said, it should be fine for most searches.
EXAMPLE: searching for play will exclude plays, played, playing, play'd, etc.
HOW IT WORKS: Will only return a line if the precise keyword is found.
WHEN YOU SHOULD USE IT: Because searching in this way is much harder for the Web server (it uses something called "regular expressions," if you're curious), the search can be considerably slower. Use this option if you get too many results when you use the "all or part of keyword" option, or when you know exactly what you're searching for.
EXAMPLE: searching for play will return play, plays, played, playing, and play'd, but it will exclude display, playhouse, etc.
HOW IT WORKS: Stemmed searches use an algorithm to strip inflections from a word. (You can find a description of the algorithm here.) It knows that playing and played, for example, are inflected versions of play.
WHEN YOU SHOULD USE IT: If you remember a quotation, but you aren't sure of a verb's tense, stemmed searches may be useful. The management recommends using the first two options before resorting to stemmed searches, because stemmed searches are not entirely accurate — they have trouble with short words, for one thing.
EXAMPLE: searching for their will return their, they're, and there.
HOW IT WORKS: Phonetic searches use the famous "metaphone algorithm" to work their magic. This involves translating English words into regularized phonetic values (description here).
WHEN YOU SHOULD USE IT: You might try phonetic searches if you aren't sure of the spelling of a word. Like stemmed searches, phonetic searches have their limitations, and the management recommends using the "all or part" or "exact" options first.
EXAMPLE: searching for play[eg] will return played and playing.
HOW IT WORKS: Regular expressions are exceptionally powerful and not particularly easy to understand. They use an arcane syntax to describe complicated searches. A good introduction to RegExp can be found here. The official documentation for MySQL RegExp is here.
WHEN YOU SHOULD USE IT: If you want to go beyond simple search techniques, or you are a programmer and you already know RegExp.
Keywords/phrases
DEFAULT: n/a
Enter up to six separate keywords or phrases in the spaces. You can exclude a keyword or phrase by selecting NOT instead of FIND in the drop-down box next to the space.
Tip #1: Unless you are supremely confident of the exact quotation you are seeking, try searching with fewer criteria, not more. The search page can perform very precise queries, but if you make a small mistake — say, if you recall that a phrase is in "Henry V" but it's really in "Henry IV, Part 2" — you won't find your phrase. And then you will weep bitterly.
Tip #2: The more keywords you have, the slower the search, and fewer lines will be returned on the search results page.
Tip #3: Conversely, fewer keywords generally means you will get more results back, because the search is less exact. The searches will execute more quickly, too.
Tip #4: Avoid searching for punctuation if possible, though apostrophes within words are fine. There are two reasons for this: 1) stemmed and phonetic searches ignore punctuation; and 2) the punctuation of Shakespeare's works varies dramatically from edition to edition, so if you're using punctuation from another edition, the search may fail entirely.
For example, you can search for call'd but don't bother with the colon in her:, if you're looking for this passage in "All's Well That Ends Well":
That you are well acquainted with yourself,
Confess 'twas hers, and by what rough enforcement
You got it from her: she call'd the saints to surety...
Works
DEFAULT: ALL WORKS
You can search in all of Shakespeare's works (the default option) or from one or more works.
Selecting two or more works: Hold down the Control key (Apple key on the Mac) when you click each selection.
Selecting a range of works: Select the first work in the range, hold down the shift key, and click the last work. All of the works in between will be selected.
Characters
DEFAULT: ALL CHARACTERS
1. There are over 1,200 characters in Shakespeare's works, and they are all listed in this menu option.
2. Stage directions are collectively considered a character; that may seem strange, but in the database, each line has to belong to a character.
3. You will also see some other strange characters, such as All or Both. These are "characters" that speak collective lines, such as the crowd at Brutus's famous speech in Julius Caesar:
All. Live, Brutus! live, live!
4. One of the characters named Poet is the voice of Shakespeare in his poems.
5. There are many characters with generic names that appear multiple times, such as Page or Servant or Third Gentleman. As the names imply, they are usually very small roles, but not always: there are three characters named Third Murderer in three different plays, but the Richard III murderer has 30 lines — more than Guildenstern.
6. A complete list of characters, along with the plays in which they appear, can be found here.
Genres
DEFAULT: ALL GENRES
Open Source Shakespeare divides Shakespeare's works into five genres:
Comedy, plays where people do funny things and get married at the end;
History, plays where people are murdered and married; and
Poetry, metered rhyming verse that are not sonnets;
Sonnets, short poems with 14 lines (except this one); and
Tragedy, plays where people are murdered in various ways for sundry reasons.
Technically, comedies, histories, and tragedies are sub-genres of plays, and sonnets are a species of poetry, but OSS tries to keep things displayed simply, especially in a menu item with only five options.
Date range
DEFAULT: 1589 to 1612
Beware: these dates are taken from the 1887 Globe Edition of Shakespeare's complete works. Thus, the dating will not always agree with modern scholarship. You have been warned.
Sort by
DEFAULT: Name of work
The lines that are found by the search will either be listed according to
1. the work to which they belong; or
2. the characters to which they belong.
Results per page
DEFAULT: 20
Up to 100 lines per page may be displayed. If you have a high-bandwidth connection, you might want to look at more than the default number of lines.
Show line text
DEFAULT: Yes
You may opt to hide the text of the lines you find. On a dial-up Internet connection, that might be a good thing.
Highlight keywords
DEFAULT: Yes
Most of the time, keyword highlighting is helpful. However, if you're cutting and pasting a line into a Word document, the highlighting will probably transfer as well, and you will have to reformat the line to make it look right.