Daily Mail, March 28, 2000
By Rebecca Levene

You might well wonder what was going on if you were walking down the street and a passer-by cried: "Thou pribbling, plume-plucked moldwarp!"

But in fact, you would have just been insulted in the language of Shakespeare - by someone who has probably visited one of several Internet sites devoted to bringing Elizabethan cursing to the modern age.

"Thou weedy, unchin-spotted baggage!" and "Thou spongy swag-bellied strumpet!" are twp other epithets available on Randy-world.com, a site which generates a new curse at the click of a button.

Of course, this site's uses are limited - unless you want to alienate all your friends and colleagues.

But there are many more serious and information-packed Bardic sites out there. Shakespeare may seem like the most old-fashioned of topics, but that has not stopped fans of the world's greatest playwright from translating his texts for the information age.

Perhaps the single most useful Shakespeaare resource online is the complete text of all his plays and poems. There are several versions, but that held at US university MIT is one of the best. As well as allowing you to download the plays themselves, each difficult word is hyperlinked to a glossary explaining what it means.

There is a very well-designed search engine, so if you want to find out who wondered whether 'to be or not to be', this is definitely the place to come.

There is a lot more than mere texts out there, too. While some struggling students may consider Shakespeare an old bore, there are plenty of web enthusiasts willing to prove that Stratford's most famous son can be a lot more fun.

The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust offers lots of educational resources and overviews of life in Elizabethan England.

Among its titbits, it reveals that Elizabethan Londoners were very infrequent bathers, reserving baths for special occasions, and that while fish and chips had yet to make their way onto the menu, vinegar was used for cleaning teeth.

The Shakespeare's Globe site, on the other hand, concentrates on the building and recent reconstruction of Shakespeare's London theatre. It includes a virtual tour around the modern building during and after its construction. The Globe site also fills in the fascinating background to this amazing endeavour.

Puritans, it explains were responsible for closing the original Globe, and little information about it was retained. But in 1982, Professor John Orrell studied a panorama of London dating from 1647 which allowed him to reconstruct the exact dimensions of the historic theatre.

Then in 1989, when the Globe's original foundations were discovered, the way was paved for rebuilding, using techniques and materials almost entirely based on those used originally.

Many people, however, find Shakespeare's work more fascinating than his life. For those who know Hamlet's soliloquy by heart, but are worried about their delivery, Elizabethan Accents may be worth a visit.

According to this site, the actors in Shakespeare's Globe wouldn't have spoken in the 'snooty' tones adopted by many an RSC actor. In fact, the dialect used by some backwater communities in the United States, unchanged for centuries, is likely to be nearer the Bard's native tongue.

While you may be somewhat dubious about declaiming "Tomorrow ands tomorrow and tomorrow" in an American accent, the site offers plenty of tips on developing your own 16th-century inflection.

But anyone using it while treading the boards may find themselves laughed off the stage.

On the net, you will also find those who argue that Shakespeare was one of the earliest plagiarists - taking credit for work which was not his own. The Shakespearean Authorship site and The Shakespearean Mystery offer plenty of information about both sides of this debate.

According to the Shakespearean Mystery, the pen which once compared a lovely woman to a summer's day may actually have been wielded by Edward de Vere, the 17th century Earl of Oxford.

As evidence, they point to the fact that the author of the masterpieces Othello and Twelfth Night must have been from a well-educated aristocrat, while from what we know about Shakespeare, he was just a commoner. And why the deception?

They explain that Edward de Vere could not openly reveal himself as the plays' author because it would have violated Elizabethan social etiquette for an aristocrat to be involved in such a lowly pursuit.

Over at The Shakespearean Authorship, supporters of Will argue that this is all much ado about nothing. Their strongest and most compelling evidence is that the 17th Earl of Oxford died in 1604 - before a third of the plays had been written.

One thing is not in doubt, though. Whether the tomes were written by William Shakespeare or Edward de Vere, the internet is the place to go for everyone who thinks that the play is the thing.

WEB LINKS

The Complete Works:
Tech-two.mit.edu/Shakespeare/
All Shakespeare's plays and poems online.

The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust:
www.shakespeare.org.uk
Educational site with lots of information about the Bard's life and works.

The Shakespeare Mystery:
www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shakespeare/index.html
Debate about the 'real' author of Shakespeare's plays.

Shakespeare's Globe:
www.rdg.ac.uk/AcaDepts/In/Globe /Globe.html
A virtual tour of London's rebuilt Globe Theatre.

Shakespearean Curses:
www.randyworld.com/shakespeare
Tell people exactly what you think of them - in the language of Shakespeare.

Elizabethan Accents:
www.renfaire.com/Language/index.html
Teach yourself Elizabethan.