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Enhanced Shakespearean Corpus

Resources from the Encyclopedia of Shakespeare's Language Project

Accessing the Enhanced Shakespearean Corpus

You can either access the corpora on the Lancaster University CQPweb server, or download the corpora (as ZIP archives containing XML files).

In either case, you need to sign the same online form on this page.

Instructions for CQPweb access

  1. Create an account on cqpweb.lancs.ac.uk if you don't already have one.
    • From the main page, click on Create account.
    • Complete the form, submit it, and then click the link that will be emailed to you to validate your account.
    • Make a note of the username of your newly-created account. You will need it for the signup-form below.
    • If you already have a CQPweb account, you do not need to create another one.
  2. Then return to this page, read through the terms of use, and complete the signup form below. (Some of the details duplicate those that you needed to enter when creating your CQPweb account – sorry about that!)
  3. By submitting the online form, you affirm that you have read and understand the terms of use, and that you agree to abide by them.
  4. Your CQPweb account will be granted access to the corpus immediately. (Click here for direct links to the corpora.)

Instructions for downloading the corpora

To download ESC :

  1. Read through the terms of use below, and complete the signup form that follows.
  2. By submitting the online form, you affirm that you have read and understand the terms of use, and that you agree to abide by them.
  3. Leave blank the field that refers to a CQPweb username. Instead, select which corpus you wish to download from the appropriate dropdown.
  4. A download will begin in your browser as soon as you submit the form.
  5. To download multiple components of ESC, return to the form and resubmit it with a different download selected.

Both kinds of access

If you want to use the corpus on CQPweb, and to get an XML download, simply enter a CQPweb username and select the component you want to download from the appropriate dropdown.

Terms of Use and signup form

Please read through the terms of use below, and, if you are willing to agree by its terms, complete the form that follows to get access.

Enhanced Shakespearean Corpus: Terms of Use

Definitions

  • You: the individual signing to agree to these terms and conditions.
  • We/Us: the AHRC-funded Encyclopedia of Shakespeare’s Language Project and its participants.
  • Enhanced Shakespearean Corpus (ESC): a multipart textual dataset, each component having a specific name and abbreviation.
  • ESC: First Folio Plus (ESC:Folio): the component consisting of the plays of William Shakespeare, specifically the edition contained in the First Folio, or (for those plays not in the First Folio) a Quarto edition.
  • ESC: Comparative Plays (ESC:Comp): the component consisting of Early Modern English plays selected as a suitable point of comparison for the plays of Shakespeare.
  • ESC: EEBO-TCP Segment (ESC:EEBO): the component consisting of a segment of the EEBO-TCP Phase I texts, other than plays.
  • ESC: Quartos: the component consisting of editions of Shakespeare’s plays in quarto.
  • ESC: Verse: the component consisting of Shakespeare’s verse.
  • Enhancements: all enhancements made to the above datasets including, among others: unified XML structure; rectified character attribution; addition of layers of regularised spelling, part-of-speech annotation, semantic annotation and lemmatisation; and connections with newly-compiled textual and character metadata.

Intellectual property

  1. IP in the underlying electronic texts of the ESC:Folio belongs to the University of Victoria and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA).
  2. IP in the underlying electronic texts used in ESC:Comp and ESC:EEBO belongs to the Text Creation Partnership (TCP), as they are drawn from the EEBO-TCP phase 1 release. The TCP’s terms on the use of EEBO-TCP phase 1 may be found here: https://www.textpartnership.net/pages/eebo-tcp.html
  3. IP in the Enhancements made to these texts by Us belongs to Lancaster University. We make them available under the terms stated in this document.

Your use of this IP is subject to the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA).

License

We ask that you fulfil the requirements of the CC BY-NC-SA license as follows:

Attribution

By making use of the Enhancements under these terms of use, you agree that you will attribute their creation to Us.

Particularly we request that, in any academic writing (published or unpublished) that you may produce on the basis of your use of the Enhancements, you credit us by citing, in the usual format for your field, the primary reference publication for each of the component corpora that you make use of.

The primary reference publications are as follows:

  • ESC:Folio
    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
  • 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
  • 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
  • ESC:Quartos
    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
  • 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

We ask you to (but you do not have to) inform us of such publications through our website, so that we can list them in appropriate public bibliographies of research that uses the Enhancements.

No commercial use

You may not make commercial use of the Enhancements under these Terms of Use. If you wish to make commercial use of the material, please contact us (j.culpeper@lancaster.ac.uk). We reserve the right to grant or not grant permission for such uses, at our discretion, based on the precise nature of the request and any such intellectual property issues as may arise.

Share Alike

You are free to transform or build upon the Enhancements. However, if you wish to distribute your contributions, you must distribute them under the same licence as we apply here to the Enhancements.

You may not add any additional restrictions to the terms of use that you apply to any such contributions. Please refer to the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA) for more details.

Now complete the following form.
Please tick to confirm this statement: I confirm that I have read, and agree to, the terms of use above.
Please enter your name:
Please enter your institutional affiliation:
(leave empty if none)
Please select your country / location:
Please enter your email address:
(and check it carefully!)
Please enter your CQPweb username:
(and check it carefully!)
If you wish to download one of the corpora, choose it here: (Download will begin after you submit the form)
Finally: type your name again below, as an electronic signature, to indicate that you agree to use the ESC according to the terms of use above.
This page was last modified on Tuesday 14 April 2026 at 11:11 am.