Author:William Shakespeare

This is an ISFDB Bibliographic Comments page for the author (or artist or editor) William Shakespeare. This page may be used for bibliographic comments or extended notes about the author, or discussion on how to the author's works are to be recorded . The link above leads to the ISFDB summary record for William Shakespeare. Please use Bio:William Shakespeare for a biographical sketch of this person. To discuss what should go on this page, use the talk page. For more on this and other header templates, see Header templates.

The Shakespeare Bibliographic page includes lots of excerpts and abridgments of works of his, but these works, in general, can't stand on their own as speculative fiction. E.g., these include short quotes referring to ghosts, demons, etc., but don't include such characters in any substantive way. The only works which we think of as having substantive speculative fiction are:

• Hamlet (the ghosts);
• Macbeth (the witches);
• Tempest (the spirit Ariel, trapped in a tree by a witch, released by the magician Prospero, and serving him);
• A Winter's Tale (Hermione dies, but is resurrected in a statue of her); and
• A Midsummer Night's Dream (fairies throughout).

Only these works will be attempted to be included here in a somewhat complete manner. Of these, only Hamlet and A Midsummer Night's Dreams were published as independent plays prior to the 18th century, and the bibliography includes all of those publications as Chapterbooks.

The "Collections" shown as "Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies" are what are traditionally referred to as "First Folio", "Second Folio", "Third Folio", and "Fourth Folio". These correspond to all collections of Shakespeare's plays up through 1685. For these works, we include only a partial contents list, limited to those five works shown above.

The bibliography currently includes all publications of these works as listed in WorldCat up through 1675.