Sources

Where every fact on this site comes from — archives, editions, and institutions.

Primary texts (the plays and poems)

The First Folio (1623) — Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (London: Isaac Jaggard and Edward Blount). The textual foundation for 18 plays that survive nowhere else. Digitized copies: the Folger Shakespeare Library and the British Library.
The quartos — individual play editions printed 1594–1622, including the “bad” texts. Digitized at the British Library and the Folger.
Open Source Shakespeare (opensourceshakespeare.org) — complete public-domain texts of the plays, poems, and sonnets, searchable by word and phrase. Used here to verify quotation wording and act/scene locations.
Project Gutenberg — public-domain editions of the complete works, used as a second check on quotation wording.

The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust (Stratford-upon-Avon) — parish registers, property records, and the documentary backbone of the biography.
The National Archives (Kew) — court records, the 1603 King’s patent, and state papers touching the company.
Dulwich College / Henslowe’s Diary — the rival manager’s account book; the richest single source on Elizabethan theatre business.
The Stationers’ Register — licensing entries that date publications; via the English Short Title Catalogue.

The Arden Shakespeare (Bloomsbury) — the standard scholarly editions, with full textual notes; the source for contested readings and dating discussions cited on this site.
The Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford University Press), including the New Oxford Shakespeare (2016) and its Authorship Companion — the source for collaboration attributions and chronology ranges.
The Folger Shakespeare Library (Washington, D.C.) — editions, the Shakespeare Documented archive, and the Folger’s public-facing scholarship.
The British Library — digitized Folio, quartos, and contextual manuscripts (CC0/PD releases used for this site’s title-page images).
Internet Shakespeare Editions (University of Victoria) — peer-reviewed digital editions and performance records.
The Royal Shakespeare Company and Shakespeare’s Globe — performance history and modern stage scholarship.

Standard scholarly biographies drawing on the documentary record (parish registers, court and property records, contemporary printed references). Where biographers disagree or infer — the lost years, the marriage, the religion — this site labels inference as inference (see methodology).

See the image captions for credits and context. Illustrated character art is a dramatization.

14 real images: Droeshout engraving (1623), Chandos portrait, First Folio title page (British Library, CC0), Hollar’s 1647 London panorama, Jonson by van Blyenberch, the alleged Marlowe portrait (attribution flagged), the 1609 Sonnets title page, the 1603 Hamlet Q1 title page, modern photographs of the Globe reconstruction (CC BY-SA 2.0), Anne Hathaway’s Cottage (CC BY-SA 4.0), Holy Trinity Church (CC BY-SA 4.0), the Birthplace (CC BY-SA 2.0), the Armada Portrait, and the Stratford funerary monument.
2 owner-supplied Vizlings character artworks (banner + character sheet), used with permission.
1 AI-generated character-style illustration, labeled as dramatization art — never as a historical depiction.

This page is the sources page; its own sources are the institutions and editions listed above, each independently verifiable.
See the image captions for credits and context. Illustrated character art is a dramatization.
Quotation verification method: methodology.
Image: Shakespeare’s Globe, the modern Bankside reconstruction (photograph by Till Westermayer, CC BY-SA 2.0) — the playhouse where these texts live on stage.