Internet Shakespeare Editions

Friends of the ISE

Join our Making Waves Fundraising Campaign and enhance your experience of Shakespeare online. You will be supporting an open-access website dedicated to bringing high quality Shakespeare resources to a global audience, and will gain access to additional features of our site. Make waves in the digital world and become a Friend of the ISE.

Both institutions and individuals can become a Friend of the ISE: 

The Internet Shakespeare Editions has been a global leader in making trusted, in-depth Shakespeare resources freely available to those who thirst for knowledge. We are visited by hundreds of thousands of students, scholars, and Shakespeare lovers every month. Large online projects such as ours need ongoing financial support to help ensure that we continue to serve our global audience. To this end, we continue to make all content open access to all, but at the same time to offer enhanced research tools for those who become Friends of the ISE. Our goal is to raise funds for a dedicated endowment of 1.5 million dollars. Such an endowment will ensure that we can continue to provide you with the same high-quality materials we have provided since the ISE's inception in 1997. 

Why "Making Waves"?

We have based the wave motif on our logo, where a swan floats serenely above the waves, reflected in black below—a hint of our global reach, as "down under" swans are black. The swan comes from Ben Jonson. In his wonderful poem in praise of Shakespeare placed at the front of the First Folio of 1623—the first collection of Shakespeare's plays—he called Shakespeare the "sweet swan of Avon":

Sweet swan of Avon, what a sight it were
To see thee in our waters yet appear,
And make those flights upon the banks of Thames
That so did take Eliza and our James!

The legend of the swan was that only in its death did it find its voice. Read a selection of the poem with annotations, or the whole poem in its original spelling.