The Shakespeare Stack Project!



Welcome to the Shakespeare Stack Project --- my effort, spanning 1992-1996, to help students and scholars by arranging, proofreading, and annotating the works of William Shakespeare and formatting them for Hypercard on the Apple Macintosh --- all as free software under the GNU General Public License. See ^z = Mark Zimmermann for links to other pages of literature, quotations, and thoughtful content, including the "Best of" Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. (As a bonus, here are some scanned images for the Macintosh of the Immortal Bard: Shakespeare Portraits.)

Change Note! I am in the process of moving the *.hqx Shakespeare Stacks to an archive site on TRIPOD, to save precious disk storage space here on HIS.COM. Please let me know if you have any trouble in downloading, converting, decompressing, and using any of the Shakespeare Stacks on your Macintosh systems. (I do not currently have any good way to test these files, since my Macs are, alas, broken.) Write to me at z@his.com (and if you do have success in getting any of these files, let me know that too --- I would appreciate confirmation that things are working). Many tnx!

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Here are Macintosh-specific binhex'd self-extracting archives for the works of Shakespeare:


Background --- the Shakespeare Stack Project

My Shakespeare Stacks are free software --- please share them with your friends! They come with NO WARRANTY WHATSOEVER. The software (but not the words of the Immortal Bard!) are copyright 1992-1996 by Mark Zimmermann, aka "^z". Feel free to redistribute as you wish. You may give the software away (or charge money for it), and you may modify it as you wish, but you may not take away anyone else's rights to do likewise.

Shakespeare Stacks are Macintosh HyperCard stacks each containing the full text of a work (or works) by William Shakespeare, as arranged, edited, styled, formatted, and proofread by me. I used as an authority the out-of-copyright "Globe Edition" of the Complete Works of William Shakespeare, first published in 1864 and revised in 1911, edited by William George Clark and William Aldis Wright. I have followed that book's text, except for obvious typographical errors, which I have attempted to correct by consulting other sources including a facsimile of Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (London, 1623, the "First Folio"). As you read and discover the inevitable mistakes, please send word of them to me so I may fix them in future versions.

When searching through Shakespeare stacks, remember that the spelling used therein is British (honour, theatre, &c.), not American. The stacks use the Palatino 12-point font, which you may wish to install for best viewing of the text. Among the many features that I commend to your attention are navigation, printing, notetaking and glossary look-up buttons; click on a "?" button for brief documentation.

I would greatly appreciate suggestions for alternative, enhanced stack designs, new and useful features, additional artwork, etc. Better yet, send me explicit examples! (A good non-copyrighted glossary of Shakespearean vocabulary would be extraordinarily helpful.)

I have, as of early 1996, finished proofreading, formatting, and distributing the entire works of Shakespeare as free software. The main reward of this project is that it has provided me with an opportunity to read and appreciate some of the greatest writing in the English language. (Helping students and scholars was a bonus!)

I thank Rand Valentine of the University of Western Ontario for his aid in making improvements to the Shakespeare Stack design, and David Wellstood for the portrait on the first card of each stack. In addition, I gratefully acknowledge the help of Apple Computer's Library (Steve Cisler, Monica Ertel, and their colleagues) in supporting my research and software development efforts. I especially thank my family --- my wife, Paulette Dickerson, and my children, Merle, Gray, and Robin --- for their help and patience while I worked on this project. Obviously, my employer is not responsible in any way for my production and distribution of Shakespeare stacks.

If you find my software valuable, please be kind enough to acknowledge me in your works based on it; it would also be courteous (and most encouraging) if you would let me know via paper or electronic mail. Thank you!

To contact me, you may send electronic mail to my Internet address: z@his.com. You may also write to my paper mail address: Mark Zimmermann, P.O. Box 598, Kensington, Maryland 20895-0598, USA

Please note that I am very busy; forgive me if I am not able to reply at length to open-ended questions (and please try to provide a self-addressed stamped return envelope, or a good Internet address, to help me answer you).

I hope you enjoy using my software!

Best,

^z

Silver Spring, Maryland, USA

March 1996 (revised November 1998 & November 1999)


Release dates of my editions of Shakespeare's works: DISCLAIMER: Shakespeare Stacks are free software, (c)1992-1996 by Mark Zimmermann. They are distributed in the hope that they will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. They are distributed under the terms of the Free Software Foundation's GNU General Public License. In brief: You may sell or give away copies of the software, but you may not take away anybody else's right to do the same. (See the GNU GPL for full details; for a current copy, write to me or to the Free Software Foundation, 675 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA. You might want to send the FSF a donation, too!)