Shakespeare Scripts
William on Web's new WoW Edition of Shakespeare's plays is a valuable resource to any groups producing Shakespeare -- companies ranging from schools, colleges and amateur clubs to regional theatres, major summer festivals and national theatre companies with multiple plays in rep on several stages.
WoW, that's affordable...
The William on Web WoW Edition plays are inexpensive -- the simplest print-only PDF is under $6 for a licence; our most advanced, macro-enhanced MS-Word license is under $21 per play. Licensees are free to print and photocopy the scripts as needed for their own use. At copy-shop rates of 3ยข a double-sided page (we had to hunt for this low price), your cost for 40 copies of a long, 80-page script like Romeo and Juliet will be under $70 (including our $21 license fee), or less than $2 per copy (!) plus your staples or bindings.
To link with the Spreadsheet Shakespeare - the heart of our system -- it was essential to have a single acting edition for each play that was inexpensive, popular, long-lived, and for sale by a co-operative publisher. We could not fill our exact needs anywhere, but we knew we'd always co-operate with ourselves, so (lacking foresight, if not ambition), we undertook our WoW Edition. Big (and ongoing) job!
The WoW Edition plays are all based on the open-source, public-domain texts currently found at http://shakespeare.mit.edu/.We found these invaluable modern-spelling scripts to be nonetheless rife with textual and computer-generated errors at the time we drew from them. Our sources for correcting the text include the Applause (Freeman 2001), Arden (Proudfoot, Thompson & Kastan 1998), Cambridge (Wright 1936), Norton Facsimile (Hinman 1968), Oxford (Wells & Taylor 2005), Pelican (Hankins 1970, Holland 2000), New Penguin (Spencer,1967), Riverside (Evans, 1974), New Variorum (Furness, 1963), and Signet Classic (Barnet 1998) editions. We consulted the recently updated http://www.opensourceshakespeare.org and the University of Victoria's elegant Internet Shakespeare Editions at http://ise.uvic.ca/. Playability is our chief aim: preserving clues for actors from early print versions, we've incorporated many later amendments clarifying the intended on-stage actions.
Punctuation and line layout is based on the Arden, the Applause and the Norton Facsimile editions. We make a rare, minor modern adjustment to use double quotation marks around quoted text. Paired commas, parentheses or em-dashes surround parenthetical phrases as best suits the context. The em-dashes ("--") used when a speaker is interrupted are only preceded with a space when speakers interrupt their own thought.
Attractive, Flexible, Practical!
Our MS-Word WoW Edition texts are easily individualized for your prompt and cue scripts; making cuts and adding margin notes is simple. The attractive layout features our hard-working formatter's choice of the legible Garamond font (included), paper-saving abbreviation of role names, generous margins for note-taking, quick-reference line numbering and self-conserving pagination (so everyone's "on the same page" after you've done 3 re-edits 2 weeks apart). Printable single- or double-sided on letter-size or A4 paper, the scripts are suitable for 3-hole punching, stapling or other bindings. Book-printed, an 80-text-page script can fit on 20 legal-size sheets to reduce costs further [Huh. Possible, but very small print: ed]
Details that make the difference
The Full version of each play is complemented by a carefully cut version we call the STC or Strike-Through-Cut that allows you still to read our original, and to restore lines, cut more, or substitute text that you prefer. Our playwright script editor worked skillfully to help make the story more easily followed and the text more readily understood by contemporary actors and audiences.
Obscure references and elaborate conceits are reduced or eliminated, while preserving the metre and rhyme, the marvelous poetry, and the characters' idiosyncrasies and interactions. Judicious cutting removes humour that's no longer funny, redundant reporting of action we've already witnessed, and those budget-busting "extra" roles that are quite easily combined. You can individualize our STC WoW Edition versions as readily as the Full ones, and they'll ensure your audiences go home well satisfied and before midnight.
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