The history of
Open Source Shakespeare

pen Source Shakespeare, like many offspring, is the fruit of love and boredom. For a couple of years, the creator of OSS, Eric Johnson (at right), reviewed plays for The Washington Times. He saw many of Washington's first-rate productions, including those of the Folger Theatre and the Shakespeare Theatre. Though it wasn't his full-time job, it was an interesting diversion from his normal duties at the paper.

Because he wanted to be a conscientious reviewer, Eric read the play before he saw it, even if he had read it before. Being an Internet-enabled kind of guy, he favored using electronic texts to look up passages for the reviews (though he preferred reading from a copy of G.B. Harrison's superb Shakespeare: The Complete Works.)

In 2001, Eric began a Shakespeare repository site, just for fun. He created a rudimentary parser that fed "As You Like It" into a database. However, the responsibilities of his day job precluded turning the idea into reality. Also, his wife and children deserved more attention than an interesting computer project, so the "Shakespeare database project," as he called it, lay fallow.

Thinking about Shakespeare
while in Iraq

n the summer of 2003, Eric found himself in Kuwait, with not a lot to do. During the war with Iraq, he had been attached to an infantry battalion with a team of fellow Marine reservists, clearing civilians away from battle areas so they wouldn't get hurt or killed. After the war, they helped get our province's infrastructure up and running. Then they were redeployed back to Kuwait, awaiting "contingencies."

What are "contingencies," you may ask? Good question. No one figured that out. Mainly, Eric and his comrades sat in a desert camp, wondering when they would be sent home. After a few weeks of sitting around watching DVDs, playing "Praetorians," and looking at his watch, Eric decided that he would do something productive. The "Shakespeare database project" was reborn.

he first question he asked was, "Has anyone else done this before?" After looking on the Web, he concluded that, surprisingly, there were very few comprehensive Shakespeare Web sites out there. The ones that were comprehensive were not free, and the free ones were not comprehensive. The only one that was both free and comprehensive was The Works of the Bard, a venerable site with an arcane yet powerful search mechanism.

Eric decided that OSS had to be at least as powerful as TWOTB, but with a more friendly interface. He wanted to make it useful to four groups of people:

1. Scholars who either lack access to the expensive commercial sites, or who want a quick way to look up passages;
2. Actors and directors, who would not only benefit from the research tools, but could print acts, scenes, or characters' lines;
3. Programmers who might like an example of how to store, retrieve, search, and manipulate a collection of texts; and
4. Anyone who happened to like Shakespeare.

With the help of a very slow Internet connection — one that made a dial-up connection look speedy — he downloaded Shakespeare's plays and the necessary software. These things having been installed on his laptop, he started the first version of Open Source Shakespeare.

Sitting at one of the tables in the middle of the long tent, he was frequently interrupted by curious Marines. As the Marine Corps is a haven for eccentrics, they did not think it odd to see someone creating a Web site in a desolate camp in one of the most God-forsaken places on Earth.

The site progressed to the point where it had all the essentials: the parser read the texts into the database, which the Web site used to display the texts, search for keywords, and display all of a character's lines. Open Source Shakespeare's foundation had been laid.

esides love of Shakespeare and the boredom of Camp Commando, Eric had one other motivation to complete OSS: he needed a thesis to complete his master's in English at George Mason University. Because his concentration was in Professional Writing and Editing, he did not necessarily have to write a traditional paper in order to satisfy the thesis requirement. As of this writing (December 13, 2003), the project has not been approved as a thesis, but he is hopeful that it will be soon.

Also as of this writing, there is a lot to do on Open Source Shakespeare. The source code and database are not yet available for downloading, so it is not truly "open source." Strangely, the simple keyword search isn't finished, but a working version of the advanced search is.

By the time OSS is submitted as a thesis, all of the plays will be indexed to the word level, instead of to individual characters' lines. That means you'll be able to click on a word and see where variations of that word occur in other works, for example. Shakespeare's sonnets and other poems will be included at some point, too.

For now, you can e-mail the management at oss@bernini-communications.com if you have any questions, comments, complaints, idle threats, or aspersions to cast. That address will disappear in favor of a response form, as the management gets too much spam right now.

If you would like to read about OSS's technical details, there's a dedicated page for that. News about the site is posted here. You can search OSS using the simple or advanced search functions, if you want to see how it all works, or browse the plays at your leisure.

Back to the main page