Via Wikipedia.

Via Wikipedia.

To celebrate the 450th birthday year of William Shakespeare, the Folger Library has made all 38 of the Bard’s plays available online in HTML for free.

Our free, high-quality digital texts of Shakespeare’s plays start with the basics: superb source texts, meticulously edited on the basis of current scholarship. The plays in Folger Digital Texts are taken from the Folger Shakespeare Library editions, completed in 2010 by editors Barbara Mowat and Paul Werstine and published by Simon & Schuster.

To these texts, we’ve added sophisticated coding that works behind the scenes to make the plays easy to read, search, and index—and lays the groundwork for new features in the future. We’ve also used the same page numbers and layouts as in the Folger print editions, so it’s simple to use the two together.

Our digital texts are also powerful scholarly tools in the fast-growing field of digital Shakespeare research. We encourage researchers and developers to download the coded texts at no cost for noncommercial purposes, including specialized studies and mobile apps.

Pretty amazing, right?

Folger will also celebrate the playwright’s birthday with a celebration on April 6 that will feature a cake-cutting ceremony with Queen Elizabeth I, sword fighting, performances and a Q&A. See a full listing of events here.