The Complete Shakespeare Reader

The Complete Shakespeare Reader gives you direct access to the full text of all 38 Shakespeare’s plays in a compact and free e-book reader, an easy-to-use reading tool that comes with some useful extra functionality.

Aimed at both a leisure reader and a Literature student, this utility comes with word search functionality and a useful set of notebooks.

One of the beauties of this reader is its portability – the program takes up less than 20 MB of your disk space and requires no Internet connection to work, which allows you to take it with you anywhere in your favorite portable device. All 38 plays in HTML format are saved in the selected drive together with their corresponding index file, which allows the program to show you a useful table of contents with all the acts and scenes that form the play. This you can use to move quickly within the book, while a similar table appears on the opposite side of the screen showing all Shakespeare’s plays ordered alphabetically within three categories – Tragedy, Comedy, and History.

The two main features available in this reading tool are the word search functionality and the notebooks. The search engine used is fast and accurate, but note that only the text will be searched, which means that titles, marginal notes, annotations, characters names, etc. are ignored during the search. You can search in the active play or perform global searches in all 38 plays. Each result is shown within the context of the verse in which it appears and is tagged with the name of the play (in global searches), the act, the scene, and the line number where you can locate it. As for the notebooks, these are simply blank text documents that refer to each individual play, and where you can add your own notes and comments.

Finally, the reader provides you with useful statistical information about each play, such as the number of scenes, words, and paragraphs, and the date the play was created.