Our core data is the Enhanced Shakespearean Corpus (ESC). It principally consists of three components:
(1) ESC: First Folio Plus (ESC: Folio)
(2) ESC: Comparative Plays (ESC: Comp)
(3) ESC: EEBO-TCP Segment (ESC: EEBO)
It also has two subsidiary components:
(4) ESC: Quartos (editions of Shakespeare’s plays in quarto)
(5) ESC: Verse (Shakespeare’s non-theatrical verse)
Access to all five components is available now via the ESC User Service website, which you can reach from the menu bar above (Project resources > Access).
If you make use of these corpora, we request that, in any publication, you cite the canonical reference for the component(s) that you have used. These are as follows.
For ESC:Folio, ESC:Quartos, and ESC:Verse:
Culpeper, Jonathan, Hardie, Andrew, Demmen, Jane, Hughes, Jennifer and Timperley, Matt (2021). Supporting studying Shakespeare: Structural markup and grammatical annotation enhancing a corpus of the First Folio. ICAME Journal 45: 37-86. https://doi.org/10.2478/icame-2021-0002
For ESC:Comp:
Demmen, Jane (2020). Issues and challenges in compiling a corpus of Early Modern English plays for comparison with those of William Shakespeare. ICAME Journal 44: 37-86. https://doi.org/10.2478/icame-2020-0002
For ESC:EEBO:
Murphy, Sean (2019). Shakespeare and his contemporaries: Designing a genre classification scheme for Early English Books Online 1560–1640. ICAME Journal 43: 59-82. https://doi.org/10.2478/icame-2019-0003