About the Modern Texts

Because Shakespeare's Words was being published by Penguin Books, we used the texts of the editions that were part of the New Penguin Shakespeare series, with permission of the publisher and editors. These are the texts that form the basis of the canon of plays and poems, both in the book and on this website. They are © 2004 Penguin Books.

The exceptions are the texts of Cymbeline and King Edward III, which at the time were not part of the Penguin series: we used J M Nosworthy's edition of the former (© 1955 Bloomsbury Press), and an edition of the latter prepared by David Crystal.		 The text on this site reflects exactly the editorial judgements, organization, layout, and lineation of the pages as found in the modern editions - with the exception that line-break hyphens in prose text have been ignored (to aid concordance searching).

For users who make use of other editions of the texts, it is important to appreciate that varying editorial decisions will sometimes affect the way in which lines are numbered or words identified and spelled, and even at times scene divisions and numbering. We have, however, included all important Folio or Quarto variants.
  Read also Introducing the original texts

 
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