13 November 2025
For the first time, students, teachers and researchers can read The Arden Shakespeare Third Series of plays in conjunction with the landmark five-volume The Arden Encyclopedia of Shakespeare’s Language in a single digital space: The Arden Shakespeare Play Collection: Text and Language
- Alongside the 42 fully annotated, world-leading Arden editions of the plays, the Encyclopedia details and illuminates the richness of Shakespeare’s language, providing a huge data set based on corpus linguistics and computational analysis.
- Navigate between the play texts and accessible, evidence based accounts of Shakespeare’s words for a richer understanding of the plays and the period in which they were first written and performed.
- Seamlessly look up meanings of words in the Encyclopedia whilst reading a world-leading Arden Shakespeare edition of a play, using the new ‘look up’ tool on the playtext page.
About The Arden Shakespeare Third Series plays:
- This ‘gold standard’ series offers modernized texts with comprehensive commentary notes glossing meanings, discussing staging issues and explaining literary allusions.
- Each play includes a lengthy, illustrated introduction by a leading scholar exploring the play’s critical, theatrical and historical contexts.
- Each year, from 2026, a small number of new Arden Shakespeare Fourth Series editions will be added to The Arden Shakespeare Play Collection: Text and Language until eventually the entire series has been incorporated.
About The Arden Encyclopedia of Shakespeare’s Language:
- Comprises five major volumes (four at launch and one to follow in 2027) that bring scholarship on Shakespeare’s language fully into the 21st-century by detailing and illuminating Shakespeare’s rich language through the tools of corpus linguistics and computational analysis.
- Volumes 1 and 2 offer a dictionary style analysis of the meanings of Shakespeare’s words to examine what Shakespeare’s words actually do in the environments they inhabit.
- Volume 3 is the first work to detail the linguistic thumbprints that characterize every play and every character within them
- Volume 4 is the first work to visually plot, explore and compare the formation of social communities through dialogue in all of Shakespeare’s plays
- In 2027, The Arden Encyclopedia of Shakespeare’s Language: Semantic Fields and Themes (Volume 5) will be added via an optional update to The Arden Shakespeare Play Collection: Text and Language.