About the Project

Who we are

Open Shakespeare is an Open Knowledge Foundation project and has been created with the help of following people:

• Rufus Pollock
• Iain Emsley
• Jonathan Gray
• Colette Sensier
• James Harriman-Smith
• Jack Belloli
• Emma Mustich
• Nika Engberg
• Adam Green
• Arabella Milbank
• Lottie Fenby
• Rachel Thorpe
• Hazel Wilkinson
• YOU

Our Aims

Open Shakespeare is only the beginning; it will serve as a forerunner to Open Literature. On the website, we provide the following and more in legally ‘open’ form:

• Multiple editions of Shakespeare’s plays.
• Short Introductions, and critical essay on Shakespeare’s works.
• Tools for annotating, comparing, searching, and analysing texts – whose code will be open, and encourage reusability in line with the Four Principles of Open Knowledge Development.

Our Rationale

We note that:

• Shakespeare is everywhere on the internet, but much of what is available is under copyright.
• Shakespeare is thus an ideal candidate for an open project.
• Such a project will be both illustrative, and innovative: always welcoming new ideas and new contributions towards its growth.

Our Licences

All the material produced by the Open Shakespeare Project including all the content on this site is available under open licenses. Specifically:

• All code is licensed under the MIT License.
• All content and data is available under a CC Attribution License.