The Comprehensive Shakespeare Dictionary on CD‐ROM (CSD) is a searchable database based largely upon two well‐known public domain Shakespearean reference works: Alexander Schmidt’s Shakespeare Lexicon, 3rd ed. (1902) and Francis Griffin Stokes’s Dictionary of the Characters and Proper Names in the Works of Shakespeare (1924). The disc contains a lexicon of over 20,000 terms and supporting citations to lines from the plays to illustrate usage. There are also plot summaries of all 37 plays as well as brief background notes and commentaries on Shakespeare’s non‐dramatic poetry, such as the sonnets or the Rape of Lucrece. A full name dictionary including characters from the plays, historical figures, and places is also included. Novices to Shakespeare, especially high school students and beginning undergraduates, might find the CSD a useful guide to the language and plays; but the disc is not an essential purchase for libraries.
The main menu includes a blue hyperlinked list of topics covered in this dictionary/encyclopedia: characters, plots, quotations, lexicon, images, biography, and a help menu. Navigation buttons for home, help, search, back, copy, print, and exit always appear on the left‐hand side of the screen (the copy function saves text to a clipboard for later printing).
The interface is fairly simple to master, but does not allow much flexibility in moving from one section to another without having to return to the home page. The characters section has an alphabetical listing of both major and minor characters and other figures mentioned in the plays and poems along with a toolbar to select the letter to search under. The entries are generally brief, but contain hyperlinked cross‐references to other characters and plays related to the character being discussed. Act and scene references are given for the appearances of the various characters.
The plots section offers short act‐by‐act synopses of the plays which might not give enough information is some cases, particulary in its accounts of the history plays. Users may need to refer to other sources to supplement the plot summaries in the CSD.
The lexicon is perhaps the most valuable component of the database, for it gives clear definitions of Elizabethan and other unfamiliar words and gives citations to examples of usage from Shakespeare’s plays and poems (though the text of those citations does not appear and the user needs to be familiar with the standard Shakespearean abbreviations for the titles and editions to locate the lines in the plays). The user can type in the first few letters and choose from the list of available terms. The lack of the actual lines from Shakespeare demonstrating how the words are used in context is a detractor.
Other sections of the CSD are somewhat disappointing because they are somewhat thin in content. The images library contains only 33 black and white images of nineteenth‐century paintings of scenes from the plays or popular actors from the time in costume. Given the almost “plain vanilla” appearance of the interface (it has only white background displays, few color features, and plain‐text pop‐up boxes), the lack of color images is quite noticeable. A cursory biography of Shakespeare which does not do much to explore the historical context of the period or to discuss the myriad debates over the authorship of the plays is the final topic covered in the CSD.
The search engine allows users to enter a keyword or to combine keywords with standard Boolean and proximity operators (AND, OR, NOT, NEAR) and find entries in the different topic sections related to those terms. Since many terms cut across the different topic categories, this feature will help those who want to explore a theme or concept in different Shakespearean works.
The CSD disc runs on PCs with Windows 3.1, Windows 95, or Windows NT. It requires 4 MB of RAM, 1 MB hard disk space, 1X or faster CD‐ROM drive, and a 256 color graphics
card. As a basic dictionary guide to Shakespeare, the CSD is a tool which will benefit lower‐level students. But given the large number of print and electronic Shakespearean reference tools available on the market today, the price for this database ($129.95 for a single user or LAN and $329.95 for a WAN) is somewhat high compared to other resources. The search engine is the one factor which makes this database superior to its print counterparts; but institutions which aleady own the two Shakespeare dictionaries included in the CSD or have comparable reference works may not want to pay for an electronic version of the same sources.
