- Female Shakespearean Characters
- If, as a woman, you'd prefer to play female characters in the Marathon (at least for any principal parts, you might be going for) you may find this Wikipedia page useful. It lists around 40 female parts in Shakespeare's plays and links to more detailed character descriptions. Remember, it's Wikipedia – so it's not entirely consistent or reliable (it lists Sycorax, for example, who is referred to in the Tempest but doesn't appear as a character). Nor is is it comprehensive: I've done a rough gender count and found 111 female characters in the complete works (see the Google docs Rôles link below). But the Wikipedia page is a good place to start looking for principal female parts.
- Google docs – Shakespeare's Rôles
- This is a work in progress – i.e. I'm still working on it so hopefully it will develop further. It's a spreadsheet displaying all the rôles in Shakespeare's plays – indicating:
- the play or plays the character appears in,
- the number of speeches spoken by the character (NOT the number of lines),
- gender (this only works for female characters so far - i.e. some smaller rôles, like "Servant", "Citizen", "Messenger" could conceivably be either male or female).
- Shakespeare Characters A-Z
- Comprehensive alphabetical list of characters with useful pronunciation guide for some of the trickier names.
On-line texts:
- Shakespeare's Words | Plays
- David and Ben Crystal's online edition of Shakespeare's Words includes this Alphabetical List of Plays and also a Chronological List of Plays – both of which link to online texts of each of the plays. The texts contain a parallel commentary, defining words which the reader might find difficult. The texts used are mostly those of the New Penguin Shakespeare.
- Open Source Shakespeare
- Based on the 1864 Globe Edition of the Complete Works – so not up-to-date with current scholarly editions – but open-source and reprintable without breaking copyright. Has some useful features but suffers from cyber-editing in places: e.g. some Dramatis Personae – generated by computerised lists of speakers – include the minor characters "All" and "Both".
- Shakespeare Aloud | The whole canon. Read Aloud. And in public
- Blog for Bill Barclay, "actor, director, composer, sound designer, and teacher" who is seeking to record/video for the web his own readings of the Complete Works in the course of one year [ from 15 May 2011 ] - after eight months he's only got through eight plays, so it's unlikely that he'll hit his target. Nevertheless, he's having to deal with similar issues as we are on the Marathon - like chronological order: he's sticking to the Wells/Taylor chronology in the Oxford Shakespeare. Worth checking out his site - apart from other assets, it has him giving one of the few available recorded readings of Edward III.
