Shakespeare Websites Directory – The Best Of The Rest

NoSweatShakespeare is just one of many Shakespeare websites worldwide dedicated to the world’s greatest playwright. Some Shakespeare websites focus on the Bard’s plays, some his sonnets, some his life and era, and some offer a combination of all of these.

Whilst we, of course, think we’re the best all-round Shakespeare website to be found anywhere, we wanted to pay tribute to the entire online Shakespeare ecosystem.

To do just this, we’ve sifted through the many hundreds of websites dedicated to Shakespeare and pulled together the below list of the top 15 Shakespeare websites. Clicking on their name will take you to a page that explains a bit more about what they do, gives you some history about the website, along with some stats on their visitors and popularity.

Further down the page, we list a further 15 websites that are more study guide and literature-focused but include a decent amount of Shakespeare information too.

The Best Shakespeare Websites

MIT Shakespeare

The Web’s first edition of the Complete Works of William Shakespeare. This site has offered Shakespeare’s plays and poetry to the Internet community since 1993. Read more about MIT Shakespeare.

Open Source Shakespeare

Since launching in 2003, Open Source Shakespeare attempts to be the best free website containing Shakespeare’s complete works. It’s targeted at scholars, thespians, and Shakespeare lovers of every kind.  Read more about Open Source Shakespeare.

Shakespeare Online

Microsoft named Shakespeare Online one of the top 10 Internet sites for students, adding that it can be “filed in the where was this when I was a kid? category.” The site is used as a teaching aid in classrooms all over the world, and it turned twenty-one years old in 2020.

Play Shakespeare

Read Shakespeare’s plays online. The PlayShakespeare.com team used the First Folio of 1623 and the Globe Edition of 1866 as sources for the texts. PlayShakespeare.com claims to be the only place to find Shakespeare’s text with proper indentation, which preserves the meter.

Royal Shakespeare Company

They perform Shakespeare’s plays at their theatres in Stratford and London and tour worldwide. Their website is dedicated to their performances but has plenty of information about Shakespeare and his plays, as well as an education section with resources for schools, teachers, and higher education.

Shakespeare.org

This website is run by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, a charity based in Shakespeare’s Stratford with the goal of helping to keep Shakespeare’s story alive.

Folger Shakespeare Library

The Folger Shakespeare Library, established on Capitol Hill in 1932 as a gift to the American people, is home to a huge collection of First Folios.

My Shakespeare

Explore a handful of Shakespeare’s plays in great detail, offering media-rich, full-text editions, interviews with the characters, performances of key scenes, and contemporary translations to make Shakespeare’s language more approachable.

Bardweb

Bardweb also goes by the name of the  Shakespeare Resource Center. You’ll find here collected links from all over the World Wide Web to help you discover William Shakespeare, along with articles on Shakespeare’s life, era, and performances.

Absolute Shakespeare

Absolute Shakespeare bills itself as the essential resource for William Shakespeare’s plays, sonnets, poems, quotes, biography, and the legendary Globe Theatre.

o each one, giving explanations of difficult and unfamiliar words and phrases.

Shakespeare Authorship

Many books and articles have been written arguing that someone other than William Shakespeare wrote his many plays, sonnets, and poems. Shakespeare Authorship offers a refreshing take on the authorship debate.

No Fear Shakespeare

No Fear Shakespeare is a book series and set of Shakespeare study guides from SparkNotes.

As with the NoSweatShakespeare ebooks, No Fear Shakespeare modernized versions of Shakespeare make reading the plays much easier. Whilst any modernization of Shakespeare’s works is obviously likely to reduce the experience and dramatic impact that reading a Shakespeare play gives, having the original text and translation text side-by-side makes a great tool to help young and first-time Shakespeare readers understand the works.

Their online study guides offer loads of free play-specific information, including:

• Summaries
• Character insights
• Main themes and ideas
• Quotes
• Quizzes
• Writing help

For some of Shakespeare’s more popular plays No Fear Shakespeare also offers teaching guides designed to help make classic literature engaging and relevant to today’s students.  These teaching guides are in old school print format only and are available to buy from Barnes & Noble.

No Fear Shakespeare in Their Own Words

SparkNotes Guides: Our guides contain thorough summaries and insightful critical analyses. We offer more than 500 guides for English literature and Shakespeare, and a vast number of guides for history, math, biology, and other subjects. Our most popular guides now include quick quizzes, so you can test your retention before the test.

No Fear Shakespeare: No Fear Shakespeare provides side-by-side translations of Shakespeare into plain English. No Fear Shakespeare is available online and in book form.

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The Best Study Guide Websites That Include Shakespeare

 

Shmoop

Shmoop offers a whole bunch of homework help and study guides across subjects as wide apart as maths, literature, art, and science. Much of their content is free, whilst they also offer a monthly subscription to students, which gives access to 400 online courses and 10,000 videos, along with other educational support. The subscription also allows members to view the site free of ads, which is a bonus!

Shmoop In Their Own Words

Shmoop is an education technology solutions company that provides engaging digital classroom tools and solutions aimed at easing the stress of the learning environment. Shmoop’s four core products support grades 6-12 and include The Shmoop Heartbeat^TM, Courses & Content, Test Readiness, and Intervention.

LitCharts

LitCharts claims to break the mould for literature study guides in that they present a bulleted-list-style summary of every single plot point in the book side-by-side with analysis and color-coded themes for each point.

On the topic of themes, LitCharts uses its own ‘Theme Wheels’ to create a visual overview of a whole book in one infographic. It’s pretty cool.
Their website also offers an innovative search function for quotes. All of the quotes in their quotes section can be sorted by location, theme, and character, allowing you to easily find quotes spoken by one character on a particular topic.

One thing to bear in mind is that most of the content and features LitCharts offers come with membership of “LitCharts A+”. This offering is a monthly or annual subscription to gives you access to a bunch of premium resources. 

LitCharts In Their Own Words

LitCharts take a completely new approach to analyzing and explaining literature. CliffsNotes and every other literature guide series that followed (including SparkNotes) all use long paragraphs of summary followed by long paragraphs of analysis.

LitCharts break that mold in several ways. LitCharts present a bulleted-list-style summary of every single plot point in the book side-by-side with analysis and color-coded themes for each point. Every LitChart includes a color-coded Themes Key, which assigns a specific color to each theme. Readers can then trace the prevalence of themes as they develop throughout the book.

 

Bartleby

Bartleby is a hub for student learning that’s been developed by Barnes & Noble Education. The website is split into two broad areas – learn and write.

The write section gives advice and tools to support better writing from students, reducing mistakes, improving writing habits, and transforming average essays into great ones. Tools include a grammar and spell checker, a plagiarism checker, and a citation tool. They even have some AI technology that can analyze your essay before you submit it to give you an idea of your likely grade.

The learn section covers school and college subjects as diverse as business, engineering, languages, maths, science, social science, and literature. Broadly speaking, their offering in the learn section is either experts to answer homework questions (with a median response time of 34 minutes), or a database that stores step-by-step solutions to millions of textbook problems.

They have a literature-specific section on their website, and although it’s tucked well away from easy discovery, we’ve been able to find 50 essays on Shakespeare.

Bartleby In Their Own Words

Study smarter with access to millions of step-by-step textbook solutions, a searchable digital database of homework solutions, and subject matter experts on standby 24/7 to provide homework help when you need it. 

Study.com

Study.com is a one-stop learning resource center, with over 27,000 video lessons and other resources aimed at students, teachers, and homeschoolers. Educational resources are split by middle school, high school, and college.

Shakespeare On Study.com

With so much content on Study.com, finding something specific can seem a little overwhelming at times. There doesn’t appear to be a Shakespeare-specific section on their site or any structure to drill into different aspects of the Bard.

However, a search for “Shakespeare” in their search box brings back around 100 articles, each of which contains a nice mix of multimedia content – text, quizzes, videos, and suggested homework help topics. As with the rest of the content on the site, a taster of each article is offered for free, and access to the entire Shakespeare article requires a paid subscription.

Study.com In Their Own Words

Study smarter with access to millions of step-by-step textbook solutions, a searchable digital database of homework solutions, and subject matter experts on standby 24/7 to provide homework help when you need it. 

SparkNotes

SparkNotes is a resource for students to turn to when you want to understand a book in-depth. Their mission is to help students understand books, write papers, and study for tests.

SparkNotes In Their Own Words

SparkNotes is a resource you can turn to when you’re confuzzled. We help you understand books, write papers, and study for tests. We’re clear and concise, but we never leave out important info.

Our guides contain thorough summaries and insightful critical analyses. We offer more than 500 guides for English literature and Shakespeare, and a vast number of guides for history, math, biology, and other subjects. Our most popular guides now include quick quizzes, so you can test your retention before the test.

We are well qualified to lend a hand: we’re graduates of top schools, we have advanced degrees galore, we’ve taught undergraduate and graduate classes, and we’ve edited books on Shakespeare, The Scarlet Letter, and the SAT (and that’s just the S’s!).

Grade Saver

GradeSaver claims to be one of the top editing and literature sites in the world, and with the amount of content available on their website, it’s hard to doubt them. The main areas of their website cover:

Free study guides – on novels, plays, poems and films. Each guide includes summaries, essays, chapter-by-chapter summary and analysis, characters, themes, author biography, and quiz.

• Questions and answers – where you can ask a question and hope to receive answers from other students or educators.
• Lesson plans for teachers – requires a paid membership to access.
• Essay editing service – pay per essay for a review and edit to your writing to ensure it “expresses your message, illuminates your strengths and captivates your reader”.
• Literature essays – high-quality papers that provide critical analysis of a piece of literature, written by students and requiring paid membership.
• College application essays – help you to understand the fundamentals of a great college application essay. Requires paid membership.
• Writing resources – free essays on how to improve different aspects of essay writing.

Shakespeare On Grade Saver

Grade Saver offer one rather in-depth biography of William Shakespeare, plus a complete study guide to each of Shakespeare’s 37 plays, long-form poems, and one study guide covering all 154 sonnets. These study guides all contain:

• An overview
• Characters
• Summary & analysis by act
• Original text
• Questions and answers
• Complete essays
• Lesson plans

Grade Saver In Their Own Words

You have goals… we have help. GradeSaver offers the highest quality study guides.

Written and edited by Harvard students. ClassicNotes are the best book notes available online, in PDF or in print from Amazon.

With millions of users each month and over 400 titles, ClassicNotes ranks among the largest academic resources available online.

We have received international recognition from USAToday, The Guardian (London) and Die Zeit (Germany) as well as many other local papers across the US and UK.

eNotes

eNotes specialize in study materials and answering student questions in the areas of literature and the humanities. They have a team of close to 2,000 “expert educators” who have answered over 350,000 questions on the site, and created over 30,000 study guides.

Lots of content is available free on the website, and for complete access to everything, there is a 24 hour free trial with the first year for $25, increasing to $50 annually. $0.50 of each subscription is donated to the Room to Read childhood literacy charity.

Once you take up a paid subscription you have access to:
• 30,000+ Expert study guides
• 350,000+ Homework help answers
• 240+ Annotated texts
• Up to 5 free questions each year
• 10 PDF downloads per month

eNotes In Their Own Words

We specialize in Q&A and study materials for literature and the humanities. Over the past decades, we’ve assembled a strong community of phenomenal Educators who provide accurate, high-quality information for any book or any question. We’re here to help!

From Macbeth and The Great Gatsby to obscure works for your higher level courses, our in-depth guides are fact-checked by our team of experts to help you understand every story, chapter, theme, and character.

CliffsNotes

CliffsNotes launched its study guide business in 1958 with a line of 16 Shakespeare study guides. Since then, they’ve grown into one of the largest study resources around and offer a website full of free articles. Their website is split broadly into three areas:

• Literature notes – Over 300 free study guides, written by teachers and professors for students as a supplement to their own reading.
• Test prep – introductions, advice, and paid books to help you prep for all sorts of educational tests, including high school, college, graduate school,l and professional
• Study guides – this area of the site is where all of the non-literature content is kept. It’s all free and is billed as help for homework, paper writing, or taking tests.

CliffsNotes In Their Own Words

CliffsNotes is the original (and most widely imitated) study guide. CliffsNotes study guides are written by real teachers and professors, so no matter what you’re studying, CliffsNotes can ease your homework headaches and help you score high on exams.

Opinions expressed in the CliffsNotes aren’t rigid dogma meant to discourage your intellectual exploration. You should use them as starting points to open yourself to new methods of encountering, understanding, and appreciating literature…

And that’s our list of the best Shakespeare websites out there, and the best general literature and study guide websites that feature Shakespeare.

What’s your take on this list – have you used any other websites that have great Shakespeare information? Join in the conversation and let us know in the comments section below!