Below are a select group of authoritative sites on Shakespeare. With every site on the web, BE CAREFUL: don't get trapped in the web. You can find great reviews of current film and drama, but there is very little decent textual criticism out there that you can trust. This is in part because copyright restricts the re-publication of authoritative studies: all of that information in all of those books and articles in the library is NOT on-line!
I URGE you as strongly as I can to avoid ".com" sites targeted at students. Their interest is not to bring you good or even accurate information, but to get hits to make adverstising dollars. Consider the source.
Here is how to get to the Electronic Reserves page for this course.
General sites: These collect a range of information on his life, works, and cultural milieu which will be helpful during the course.
Mr. William Shakespeare and the Internet. This is probably your first go-to site. Note that while it does not necessarily filter out junk, there are links here to a myriad of fascinating sites. The links on the site's homepage are very helpful. Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in London. Along with its performance schedule, this site has lots of great information about the theatre's construction and history. The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust has information about Shakespeare's life and home as well as his works. The Folger Library in Washington DC also has lots of reliable information about Shakespeare's life, times, and plays. In Search of Shakespeare is a wonderful site linked to the PBS series. The Interactive Shakespeare Project from Holy Cross has, among a range of interesting material, a neat way to visualize the space of the Globe. The Development of the Scenic Spectacle depicts a variety of other devices used to create theatrical effects during the Renaissance.
Works on line: The big advantage of these databases is that you can use them as concordances to do word searches over larges swathes of text. Most allow you to search just one play at a time. I only list sites here that collect several or all of the plays. Note that different editors will lineate and spell words differently--so, run the same search on several databases. Note that for my classes you must always quote from our Norton textbook, so you'll have to take your search back to our text to find the reference there; this means you cannot just cut and paste text in to a paper.
The Works of the Bard. This seems to be the one site which allows you to search all of the plays at once. The Works at MIT. Easy to use; search one play at at time. The ELF. You can search one play at a time here. The Great Books Index. Very clearly laid out, to search one play at a time. The e-Server Collection from Carnegie-Mellon. This is great because it has lots of other plays too. The Perseus Project's Renaissance collection also has lots of other Renaissance texts along with Shakespeare's works. The Internet Shakespeare Editions. This only has a few of the plays, and is growing. This also includes much good information about Shakespeare.