With little fanfare, and no pomp and circumstance, Google may have done Shakespeare proud.
"How beauteous mankind is!" For lovers of William Shakespeare, memorizing one of Hamlet’s soliloquies or recalling whether "The Tempest" is a romance or a tragedy just got easier.
Web search leader Google Inc. recently launched a site devoted entirely to the Bard that allows users to browse through the texts of his plays.
Now Shakespeare’s oeuvre is even more accessible. Search within Hamlet for "to be or not to be" to read the rest of his famous soliloquy. Find out who called the world his "oyster" and why. Browse through a familiar play – or follow your curiosity to discover a new one.
Tying in with the 50th anniversary of New York’s popular outdoor Shakespeare in the Park festival, Google launched its "Summer with Shakespeare" website.
While searching within a play will find the correct quote, reading the bard’s collected works through Google can be an interesting experience.
The site, which was introduced in conjunction with Google’s sponsorship of New York’s "Shakespeare in the Park," also provides links to related scholarly research, Internet groups, and even videos of theater performances of Shakespeare plays.
It also encourages users to "take a literary field trip" by searching for London’s Shakespeare’s Globe Theater on Google Earth, which combines satellite imagery, maps and a search engine to find historic locations around the world.
The “Explore Shakespeare with Google” micro-site, in fact, is one of the most genuine, complete efforts Google has put forth since its IPO. The site is not a “beta”, it is not a “limited test” by invitation only, it is not a vehicle to mine user data to sell ads (at least not at present) and it is not a mere shell of offerings available elsewhere.
What is it then? According to Google:
The complete plays of Shakespeare now accessible at your fingertips. In Shakespeare’s day, gaining greater access to his plays meant duking it out with the other "groundlings" for the best view of the stage. It took centuries for the modern printing press to bring plays like Hamlet to people all around the world – and for the Bard to become one of the most quoted writers in history.
From a quick perusal of some of the comedies and tragedies, the plays that have been scanned in full tend to be older published versions of the works—one was dated 1886—and a few of the illustrations to the plays also featured shots of the scanner’s pink fingertips.
The micro-site homepage features direct-links to full books of Shakespeare’s plays through the Google Books Library Project, as well as links to preview portions of Shakespeare related books for sale. The “Explore Shakespeare with Google" micro-site also features a virtual “literary field trip” to the Globe Theater and other Shakespearean landmarks via Google Earth and information on this summer’s free performance of Macbeth at the Delacorte Theater in New York’s Central Park.
And if you decide you want to buy a copy, "All editions" will show you every version in Google Book Search, many of which are available for purchase.
Google’s Shakespeare site uses the search company’s controversial Google Book Search, previously known as Google Print. The company’s ambitious plan to scan all the world’s books and put them online in searchable form has met with much disapproval from authors and publishers around the world. Google intends to digitize all the books held by its library partners whether in the public domain or in copyright.
Authors or publishers who do not want their books scanned have to opt out of the program, an action that has generated much bad feeling. Some writers and publishers believe that Google should have to ask their permission to digitize their works, not the other way around.
Jen Grant, a member of the Google Book Search team, noted in a company blog that some print versions of Shakespeare’s plays may not be in the public domain everywhere in the world.
"Where copyright status is in question, we protect the publisher by showing the Snippet View," Grant wrote. Instead of showing the complete text relating to a search of a book’s content, the Snippet View instead provides some information about a work including a few excerpted sentences, much like a card-catalog listing.
Other websites already offer access to Shakespeare’s complete works, including the MIT-Shakespeare-Homepage and the University-of-Victoria’s-Internet-Shakespeare-Editions. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology site doesn’t currently provide search capabilities, and the Canadian university uses Google’s search engine.
Oh, for the record, after asking his question, Hamlet goes on to wonder "whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them?"