LibGuides: English Research Guide: Shakespeare

Books and E-books

Use the online catalog to find books, e-books, DVDs, and CDs.

Note the subject headings in the catalog record. For Shakespeare, unlike most authors, you can do a "Subject" search for a specific title ("Macbeth," "Shakespeare Sonnets").

Circulating books on Shakespeare are on the lower level, with call numbers between PR 2751 and PR 3099.

Editions of plays are between PR 2801 and PR 2839, alphabetically by title (from All's Well That Ends Well to A Winter's Tale). We should have "Arden editions" of all the plays.

Books on the sonnets are in the PR 2848 area.

Booth, Stephen. Shakespeare's Sonnets (PR 2948 .A2 B6 2000)

Callaghan, Dympna. Shakespeare's Sonnets (PR 2848 ,C34 2007)

Edmondson, Paul, and Stanley Wells. Shakespeare's Sonnets (PR 2848 .E35 2004)

Matz, Robert. The World of Shakespeare's Sonnets: An Introduction (PR 2848 .M33 2008)

Muir, Kenneth. Shakespeare's Sonnets (PR2848 .M85 2005)

Schiffer, James. Shakespeare's Sonnets: Critical Essays (PR2848 .S466 1999)

Schoenfeldt, Michael C. A Companion to Shakespeare's Sonnets (PR 2848 ,C86 2010)

Vendler, Helen. The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets (PR 2848 .V46 1999)

Though most books on Shakespeare are in the PRs, a few are in other areas, e,g. Burr's Playgoing in Shakespeare's London (PN 2596 .L6 G87 2004) in the Theatre section. We urge you to browse the shelves, but be sure to use the online catalog, through which you can access e-books, including Richard Dutton's 4-volume A Companion to Shakespeare's Works (2003). Volume 4. Includes an essay on the sonnets.

Articles

The most complete database for articles on Shakespeare, and literature in general, is:

MLA International Bibliography (MLA)

This database provides citations for journal articles and book essays since about 1926. Please see the link at the bottom of this box to access it.

See the Reference guide if you want a review of database basics and Boolean operators.

The MLA database doesn't have abstracts, so you'll mainly be searching the article title and subject heading. (If you use the Advanced Search, you can search full text--but only for articles available in full text in this database. You'll miss book articles and citations for articles in full text in other databases, for which MLA provides a "Check LinkSource" link.)

If you want an article that isn't available in full text (or a book we don't have), please see the reference librarian (or e-mail him at arobinson@lagrange.edu) to order it on interlibrary loan, or determine if we have the journal in print.

JSTOR provides full text for many scholarly journals, from the first issue published up to about 5 years ago. In JSTOR, you can search the full text (enclose phrases in quotation marks, as in Google: "merchant of venice") or limit your search to a particular field ("Language & Literature").

Project Muse works like JSTOR (again, use quotation marks to search for phrases), but it covers more recent journals (the last few years up to the current issue). See below for the link to Project Muse.

MLA International Bibliography (literature and language) This link opens in a new window
The MLA International Bibliography offers a detailed bibliography of journal articles, books, and dissertations. Produced by the Modern Language Association (MLA), the electronic version of the bibliography dates back to the 1920s and contains over 1.8 million citations from more than 4,400 journals & series, and 1,000 book publishers. Subjects consist of literature, language and linguistics, folklore, literary theory & criticism, dramatic arts, as well as the historical aspects of printing and publishing. Listings on rhetoric and composition and the history, theory, and practice of teaching language and literature are also included. In addition to the bibliography, the database includes the MLA Directory of Periodicals; the association's proprietary thesaurus used to assign descriptors to each record in the bibliography; and a proprietary, searchable directory of noted authors' names, with links to brief descriptive notes.
Project Muse This link opens in a new window
Project MUSE offers over 220 quality journal titles from 37 scholarly publishers covering the fields of literature and criticism, history, the visual and performing arts, cultural studies, education, political science, gender studies, economics, and many others. Online editions are often available earlier than print editions.
JSTOR This link opens in a new window
JSTOR provides access to more than 12 million journal articles, books, images, and primary sources in 75 disciplines.

Welcome

This guide supplements the main English Research Guide. Please ask Jamie Coen for any help you may need along the way.

Reference

You'll find reference books on Shakespeare on the main level of Lewis Library, call numbers between REF PR 2751 and REF PR 3081, including:

The Cambridge Guide to the Worlds of Shakespeare (REF PR 2976 .C295 2016)
The Norton Facsimile First Folio of Shakespeare (REF PR 2751 .A15 1968)
William Shakespeare: The Complete Works (REF PR 2754 .W45 1986)
The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare (REF PR 2892 .O952 2001)
Concordance to Shakespeare (Bartlett) (REF PR 2892 .B34 1966)
William Shakespeare (vol. I His World, vol. 2 His Work, vol. 3 His Influence) (REF PR 2976 .W5354 1985)
Pronouncing Shakespeare (REF PR 3081 .C87 1998)
Shakespeare’s Words: A Glossary & Language Companion (REF PR2892 .C78 2002)
Oxford Illustrated Shakespeare Dictionary (REF PR 2892 .C79 2015)

For overviews of Shakespeare's life and works, see British Writers (REF PR 85 .B688 vol. 1) or the Dictionary of Literary Biography available through the link below.

We have the 20-volume 1989 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary in print (REF PE 1625 .O87 1989), but you'll probably want to use the online version, which you can access through GALILEO or through the link below.

Oxford English Dictionary (OED) This link opens in a new window
Historical dictionary of the English language.
Dictionary of Literary Biography Complete Online This link opens in a new window
For 30 years, libraries have looked to Dictionary of Literary Biography for biographical and critical essays on the lives, works and careers of the world's most influential literary figures. Now imagine this print reference - more than 16,000 articles and thousands of images - online and digitized to match the look and feel of the print source! This award-winning content is now easy to search, retrieve and analyze. This online collection is comprised of: Dictionary of Literary Biography Dictionary of Literary Biography Documentary Series Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook That's a total of more than 420 volumes and 164,000 pages that are easy to search and retrieve.

DVDs

DVDs are on the upper level. Many of our Shakespeare DVDs, including 24 titles in the BBC Shakespeare series, are between DVD PR 2801 and DVD PR 2839 (alphabetically). Others are shelved with other feature films in the DVD PN 1997 area. These too are (more or less) alphabetical; e.g., the Kenneth Branagh Hamlet is DVD PN 1997 .H253 2007, while the Branagh Much Ado about Nothing is DVD PN 1997 .M834 2003.

To limit your search in the online catalog to DVDs, select "DVD" in the pull-down menu for "location"