The Folger Shakespeare provides full-text searching of all of Shakespeare’s plays, poems, and sonnets. The Shakespeare’s Works search returns results by speech, and links your results to the relevant speech in the reading text. It’s important to note that because the search returns results by speech, the number of results is the number of speeches that contain matches, not the number of keyword matches.
Basic search
By default, the search provides results that contain all of the words you enter in the search bar. It doesn’t matter if the words are in order, but if you include words that are not in a given speech, a result will not be returned. Say you are looking for the famous “Two households” prologue from Romeo and Juliet, but all you remember is something about “households” and where it takes place. If you search Verona households you will find what you’re looking for, even though “households” appears before “Verona” and there are some words in between. But Venice households will return no results, because the word “Venice” doesn’t appear in the speech.
Exact match
If you are looking for a specific phrase, like “to be or not to be”, or “my kingdom for a horse”, put your search words in quotes. The search will return only results where that exact phrase appears. Remember that spelling is important, but punctuation will be ignored. So “To be! Or not to be.” will return a result, but “To bee or not to bee” will not. You can combine basic match and exact match to return speeches with specific phrases that also contain certain keywords; for instance, searching “to be” question returns speeches containing lines like “To be or not to be—that is the question” and “I will be a fool in question, hoping to be the wiser by your answer”.
Truncation character
Sometimes you are interested in finding variations of a word, like “horse”, “horses”, “horsemanship”, and “horsecart”. To perform this sort of search, enter your term followed by the asterisk (*) character. This character is best used at the end of a word; for instance, less* returns results that include “less”, “lesser”, and “lessens”. Using the truncation character at the beginning, or inside of, a word can produce unexpected results depending on your search term(s), and we don’t recommend it. You can use this type of search as part of a basic search, such as less* than to return “Lesser his person than an ill report”, or as part of an exact match search, such as “less* than” to return “That’s lesser than a little”.
Need help?
If you are looking for help getting the results you are looking for, or if you notice problems with your results, email folgertexts@folger.edu.