Review of “ShakespearePlaysPlus Text Corpus”

Abstract

ShakespearePlaysPlus is a freely available digital text corpus of William Shakespeare’s plays. The 37 plays were compiled from the Oxford University Press 1916 Edition of “The Complete Works of William Shakespeare” and annotated by Mike Scott for his own research in 2006. The plays are organized in three categories according to their type, i.e., comedies, historical plays and tragedies. The speeches of all characters have been extracted into separate text files. The text files are marked up in a pseudo-XML style and stored in Unicode. The corpus is downloadable as an extractable zip-file. This review presents a detailed look at the text corpus, its creation and composition. ShakespearePlaysPlus is compact and marked up with essential information, making it a durable, portable and easily reusable resource.

Keywords

• corpus analysis
• english
• shakespeare
• text collection
• theatre