New Jisc agreement brings Shakespeare to life

Jisc and Thomson Gale today announced an agreement to make available to the academic community the new online resource, The Shakespeare Collection. 

The most comprehensive and authoritative online resource for scholarly research on Shakespeare and his works, The Shakespeare Collection, from Thomson Gale, includes a wide variety of sources, from Shakespeare’s First Folio to the present day. It includes the complete series of Arden Shakespeare, folios, quartos, historical texts, prompt books, journals, biographies, reference works and images. It is a research database that offers an unchallenged breadth of information for studies in English Literature, Renaissance, History and Performance Studies, containing detailed criticism and commentary and providing the wider cultural and historical context. 

The Shakespeare Collection contains the full text and fully-searchable ArdenShakespeare series and reproduces works held by the British Library, the Bodleian Library, The Shakespeare Centre at Stratford-Upon-Avon, the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, the Shakespeare Library at Birmingham Central Library and the Library of Congress. 

Lorraine Estelle, Jisc Collections Team Manager, said: “This is a resource with huge potential for learning and teaching. Not only does it make the invaluable Arden commentaries available online for the first time, but contains an extraordinary wealth of background information, cultural context and support materials which make this an important resource for students, teaching staff and researchers.” 

Jill Jones, General Manager Library Reference EMEA said: “We are delighted that Jisc has recognised The Shakespeare Collection as being of great value to the research and study of Shakespeare and related areas. At Thomson Gale we are proud to be making this rich collection available in a fully searchable form to the academic community.  The Shakespeare Collection brings together the excellence in scholarship of the Arden texts with primary source materials and Thomson Gale’s expertise in platform development online.” 

This resource offers the sophisticated functionality of Thomson Gale’s other digital collections such as Eighteenth Century Collections Online and Times Digital Archive but also the distinctive feature of allowing users to compare multiple versions of the same text published in different periods and contexts, side-by-side on a split screen.   

For further information please contact:

Philip Pothen (Jisc)