vandals homes geography

while houses are at the centre of Munro's art, they are often places of marginalization in her stories, especially with regard to the women who inhabit them. Accordingly, a consideration of the peripheral visions in Munro's fiction must take into account the connections between gender and space. Munro says that early in her career "there was a feeling that women could write about the freakish, the marginal. [...] I came to feel that was our territory, whereas the mainstream big novel about real life was men's territory. I don't know how I got that feeling of being on the margins; it wasn't that I was pushed there. Maybe it was because I grew up on a margin" ("Art" 255, emph. Munro's). The comment underscores Munro's persistent accentuation of the spatial aspect of concepts such as "territory" and "margin," which critics often deploy primarily as tropes. And, in "Vandals" and other stories, Munro extends the link between gendered and regional marginality to explore the peripheral enspacement of fiction it self, as well as the connections among stories, gender, and space. Munro asks readers to consider ways in which women might stage protest from the margins and what form that protest might take in fiction. Given Munro's house-fiction metonym, this request may even instigate a re-vision of contemporary spatial theory; which has tended to privilege tropes of mobility and deterritorialization. Munro's "Vandals" tells the story of a young woman named Liza, who, with her husband, Warren, visits the empty house of her older friend Bea and goes on a rampage, mutilating the house's interior for reasons that are initially unclean Through a series of flashbacks it becomes apparent that Liza and her brother Kenny used to visit Bea and her husband Ladner when they were children, and that Ladner repeatedly sexually abused them in the forest behind his house. At the most literal level, space is not simply a backdrop for the story; the traversing, invasion, and vandalizing of it are central. The narrative is especially rife with excursions and tours, which are by no means innocuous but which appear as tools of an oppressive masculinity that controls and orders space. Ladner's books, which include The Peninsular War and The Peloponnesian Wars, are reminders that space is not only a site of dispute but an object and tool of it, while Warren's name doubly puns on "warring" and "warren" to underscore further the kinship of space and conflict. In "Vandals' such hostilities arise when men enact their urge to define and dominate otherness through gestures of dividing and enclosing. In order for Ladner to define his own mobile subjectivity, he attempts to make the apiarian-named Bea like the dead animals he puts on display: inert and enclosed. Mobility represents agency in space, and in "Vandals" it is the privilege of men. Peter Parr brings Bea "into an orderly life" through his weekly driving tours (264), Liza's father moves his family nomadically from place to place, Warren drives "his snowmobile" whi le Liza rides (261, emph. mine), and Kenny notably dies in a car crash. Most conspicuously of all, Ladner uses his mobility and familiarity with land to assert authority and discipline others. The tour he gives Bea leaves her feeling lost and powerless; the two conditions often cognate in the story. Bea initially plans to introduce herself to Ladner with a story that she is lost, but her spatial helplessness becomes real when Ladner has her within his space: "He did not slow down for her or help her in any way" (270) and she "couldn't keep track of their direction or get any idea of the layout of the property" (272). Ladner takes pleasure in her vulnerability to a wilderness that he has subdued,...

RSC on Hamlet

http://www.rsc.org.uk/hamlet/tragedy/home.html

all sorts of good stuff

great resource for all sorts

The Shakespeare resources are but a small taste of what's available here

University of Houston Teachers Institute

http://hti.math.uh.edu/curriculum/units/index.php

examples follow


CURRICULUM UNITS

2008
One Cell to Many: The Dynamics of Life
Great Films and How They Shaped American Politics
African History: Ancient Times to the Atlantic Slave Trade Era
Real Wor(l)d Problems
Everyday Physics: The Way the World Works
Comedy in Literature: Greece to Hollywood
What Does It Mean to be an American? : Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the United States

2007
Playwriting: Crafting and Adapting Plays for School-Aged Children
World Mythologies
Pre-Columbian Mathematics
Popular Music: A Window to Our Students' Cultures
Weather and Climate Change
Wetland Ecology

2006
Reading the City: Houston in Fiction and Non-Fiction
Exploring the Literary Landscape
Ethics: Science, Philosophy, and the Self
Health Care Law, Policy and Ethics: Understanding American Health Care
The World the Immigrants Made
Photography: Steps Toward Visual Literacy
Creative Writing in the Schools
Probability and Statistics in Everyday Life

2005
Art and Society: How People and Cultures Define and Value the Arts
Structural Engineering: Buildings and Bridges
Chemistry through the Ages: From Alchemy to Molecular Design
Living with Geologic HazardsHealth, Illness, and Medicine in Houston: A Cross-Cultural Exploration
Health, Illness, and Medicine in Houston: A Cross-Cultural Exploration
Latin America Before the Spanish: Pre-Columbian Art, History and Culture
The Medieval World: Life, Thought, Action
Perspectives on the Presidency
Shakespeare and Film

2004
America at War
Beyond Houston: The Literature of Travel and Exploration
Exciting Experiments and the Ethics of Experimentation
Eye On America: Playwrights and American Life and Times
George Gershwin, Aaron Copland, Samuel Barber and the American Century
Hands-on Geometry: How We Can Use Geometry to See the World Around Us
The New Houston: New Immigrants, New Ethnicities, and New Inter-Group Relations in American's Fourth-Largest City
The Process of Justice: How American Courts Work from Top to Bottom
Wild Habitats in the Urban Landscape

2003
African American Slavery in the New World: A Different Voice
From FDR's Death to the Resignation of Nixon: America from 1945 to 1974
Heroes and Heroines in History and Imaginative Literature
Literature as Healing Balm: Multicultural Women Writers in America
The Science in Science Fiction
"There's No Place Like Home": Architecture, Technology, Art, and the Culture of the American Home, 1850-1970
The Twentieth Century's Most Significant English-Language Novels for Children and Young Adultsc
Understanding the Wild Things Next Door: The Nature of Houston

2002
Drinking Water: Finding it; Making it Clean; Using it Wisely
Ethnic Music and Performing Arts in Houston
Houston Architecture: Interpreting the City
New Developments in Understanding the Human Body
Reflections on a Few Good Books
Shakespeare's Characters: The Lighter Side
Sports Autobiographies: Mirrors of American Culture

2001
Figuring the Odds: Learning to Live with Life's Uncertanties
Film and American Values Over the Decades
Multicultural Works: The Richness of the Drama of America
Shakespeare Alive!
World Order: What Current Events Tell Us About World Politics

2000
Adolescence and Alienation
Articulating the Creative Experience
Global Warming, Air Pollution, and Great Storms
Immigration and Latinos in the United States
Critical Analysis of Graeco-Roman Myths and Related Contemporary Issues
Jazz History: The Art and its Social Roots

1999
Addressing Evil
Technology and the Discipline of Chemistry
Hollywood Distortions of History
The History, Economic Base, and Politics of Houston
Symmetry, Patterns, and Designs
The United States in the 1960s

great resources for Hamlet Shakespeare

as seen previously in excerpts

The Language of Hamlet
http://hti.math.uh.edu/curriculum/units/2001/04/01.04.03.php

Making Shakespeare Accessible to the High School Student
http://hti.math.uh.edu/curriculum/units/2001/04/01.04.07.php

Flesch-Kincaid

The Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level Readability Formula

Step 1: Calculate the average number of words used per sentence.

Step 2: Calculate the average number of syllables per word.

Step 3: Multiply the average number of words by 0.39 and add it to the average number of syllables per word multiplied by 11.8.

Step 4: Subtract 15.59 from the result. The specific mathematical formula is: FKRA = (0.39 x ASL) + (11.8 x ASW) - 15.59 Where, FKRA = Flesch-Kincaid Reading Age ASL = Average Sentence Length (i.e., the number of words divided by the number of sentences) ASW = Average number of Syllable per Word (i.e., the number of syllables divided by the number of words)
Analyzing the results is a simple exercise.
For instance, a score of 5.0 indicates a grade-school level; i.e., a score of 9.3 means that a ninth grader would be able to read the document. This score makes it easier for teachers, parents, librarians, and others to judge the readability level of various books and texts for the students. Theoretically, the lowest grade level score could be -3.4, but since there are no real passages that have every sentence consisting of a one-syllable word, it is a highly improbable result in practice.

Scenes in Hamlet to consider

As we read and analyze Hamlet, there are specific scenes that show particular promise for discussion, including the first Ghost scene with Hamlet, the scene between Hamlet and Ophelia that occurs off stage but is described by Ophelia to Polonius, the scene between Hamlet and his mother, the scene when Hamlet sees the King at prayer, and the Queen’s description of Ophelia’s death.
In the ghost scene, how should the actors approach this scene? Shakespeare’s audiences believed in ghosts and they knew the king was dead, so an actor walking about the stage as the ghost would not have been implausible or laughable to them. The audience wouldn’t need special effects to believe in the ghost. The ghost’s speech would not have to sound as if it came “from the great beyond.”
In the scene with Ophelia and Hamlet (II.1.73-98), the audience only knows Ophelia’s interpretation of the exchange. She is too naïve to realize that Hamlet is only acting, badly acting at that. No one would actually act in the manner she describes. Students should actually act out what she says to see this point.
Another key scene with Ophelia that students can relate to is the one between Ophelia, Laertes, and Polonius. Laertes warns her not to trust Hamlet, that he will only use her. He basically states that men are untrustworthy and only interested in what they can get from a woman. Then her father warns her against Hamlet and uses her to get information. Both Laertes and Polonius stress the fact that as heir to the throne, Hamlet must marry someone who would be good for the state, preferably a princess. Obviously Ophelia does not fulfill the requirement. Later on in the play, Hamlet abuses her, deserts her, and kills her father. No wonder she commits suicide. She is completely alone at her death. She has lost everyone. Her father is dead, killed by her lover; her lover told her he didn’t really love her and has left town; and her brother is out of the country. Poor Ophelia is truly the most tragic figure in the play.
In Act III, scene 4, the dialogue between Hamlet and his mother in her room or “closet” consists of rapidly alternating single lines that show a “head on clash, each [character] intensely sensitive to the other’s thoughts and feelings” (Gibson and Pickering, 68). In the graveyard scene, the fast paced dialogue between Hamlet and the gravedigger is used for humor, but in this scene it is used to show the tension between Hamlet and Gertrude. This scene is also problematic because of the film versions that create a sexual tension between Hamlet and his mother. Several authors and filmmakers have commented on the so-called Oedipal complex of Hamlet, but nowhere in the text is this seen. Whether or not there is any real or imagined incest between Hamlet and his mother would make a good debate topic at this point in the reading of the play.
In Act III, scene 2, Hamlet sees the King at prayer, or what he thinks is at prayer. The King wants to pray, and it looks like he is. Hamlet wants to kill him, and he is armed and ready. However, there is almost a stop-action. Hamlet is poised for the kill and then cannot do it. He cannot kill Claudius for more than religious reasons. Granted, Hamlet does not want Claudius killed while praying, enabling Claudius to go to heaven, but there are other reasons. For one thing, dramatically, this would be too easy and undramatic. If Hamlet killed Claudius now, there would be no need for all of the deaths later in the play, no “free-for-all” at the end (Goldman, 245-6). Hamlet has spent so much time trying to prove Claudius’ guilt that he doesn’t know what to do now that he has proved it.
When Ophelia commits suicide, the scene is not enacted on the stage. Instead, Gertrude relates the manner of Ophelia’s death to Claudius and to Laertes, Ophelia’s brother (IV.7.190-208). Gertrude’s lyric and romantic rendition of Ophelia’s death reveals something of Gertrude’s character. On first glance, the speech seems romantic and melodramatic. However, if Ophelia died alone, how did Gertrude know all of the small details that she relates in this speech? One possibility is that she witnessed the suicide. If so, the question becomes, why did she do nothing to stop Ophelia? Was she too shocked to act? Doubtful. Was she envious of Ophelia? Perhaps. Does Gertrude wish to die in this romantic way? Maybe. Like Ophelia, Gertrude has no real power or sense of self in the play. She is a product of her time, a time when women were exploited and controlled by men. Her short line, “Drown’d, drown’d” (IV.7.210), seems wistful, as if she were reliving the scene in her mind.
In general, Hamlet is a character that is floundering. He does not know what he feels or what to do. He is a character torn between being a medieval avenger and what he would consider a modern hero. [As a medieval avenger, his father fought old Fortinbras in single combat. Claudius uses more modern and diplomatic methods in sending ambassadors to Norway’s king in order to prevent a war.] What should Hamlet do? Who should he believe? A ghost? His mother? His uncle? Ophelia? He wants to be a hero, but he does not know how. At the end, he matures and no longer fears death. He says to Horatio about the possibility of death in his duel with Laertes, “If it be now, ‘tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all” (V.2.233-236). The duel also gives the play an energized finale. There is revenge, dueling, murder, a poisoned chalice, deceit, and forgiveness—all in the final scene. In the end, Hamlet acts without hesitation and confusion. He wants Horatio to live to let the world know the truth (McEvoy, 188-189; Epstein, 329-331).

Hamlet Fatal Flaw

THAT OLD BLACK MAGIC: THE TRAGIC FLAW
Contrasting Hamlet with Macbeth clarifies one major reason why Prince Hamlet’s tragedy raises so many questions. Macbeth’s “tragic flaw” is clearly excessive ambition. He says that he is ambitious more than once, and Lady Macbeth adds ample support to that interpretation of Macbeth’s character. Her domination of her husband in the play exploits that flaw. We English teachers all know that a tragic hero must fall from the effects of a major character flaw (plus outside forces), and Shakespeare knows well how to play this game. But in Hamlet he makes his protagonist more intriguing by making it more difficult for the audience to decide what Hamlet’s flaw might be. Hamlet introduces the idea in Act1, Scene 4, when he speaks of the “vicious mole of nature,” “the stamp of one defect” that can bring a person “otherwise as pure as grace” to “his own scandal” (24-38). The ghost of the dead King Hamlet appears immediately and informs Prince Hamlet that his father was murdered by the king’s brother, Claudius, now king and married to the queen, Hamlet’s mother. Of course Hamlet’s resentment of the marriage of Claudius to Gertrude is one of the first things we learn about the prince, but the major thrust of the play focuses more on why Hamlet “fails” to exact the revenge demanded by the ghost. Hamlet asks this question multiple times, giving possible reasons that range from “bestial oblivion” to over-intellectualizing, from cowardice to lack of honor (“O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!”). This element of the play is emphasized by the actions of other characters. Hamlet’s strategy for finding the truth (his pretended madness) causes other characters simultaneously to delve in their own analyses—attempts to explain Hamlet’s behavior. Ophelia, Polonius, Claudius, and Gertrude each offer interpretations that range from love (“mad for thy love?”) to grief for his father’s death and resentment of his uncle’s and mother’s “o’erhasty marriage.”
Part of my approach to the play is certainly traditional. Its primary focus is to attempt to explain Hamlet’s tragic flaw. I find it beneficial to introduce my students to a variety of critical interpretations with the following handout, which includes several inserts in a lighter tone to get them to think about the handout on more than one level:
Is Shakespeare giving us a philosophical or a psychological argument in Hamlet and its tragic hero? Does Hamlet fail to act in time because the world is arguably beyond our effective comprehension? because he has a particular psychological problem, such as an Oedipus Complex? or because his character is too weak for the task--he is a coward, a ditherer, or a dullard and dolt? [Editor's note: The observant in the crowd will notice that this lesson contains either two or three sentences at this point. The first starts with the word "is," the second with the word "does." Is the next sentence, which begins with the word "editor" in the possessive form, part of "the lesson" or is it the beginning of a second lesson--perhaps something about sentences and paragraphs, or punctuation, or positioning editor's notes, or how to end a sentence inside brackets!] Is Hamlet a strong character or a weak one? How does the Laurence Olivier production present him and explain his delays? How does the Mel Gibson Hamlet play? How do you explain them? [Editor's note: Why is the above paragraph written in present tense?] [Editor's note: Should any or all of these editor's notes appear as footnotes rather than insertions?] [Editor's note: Does the author of the note appear to believe his audience is capable of learning more than one thing in one day?] [Editor's note: How many lessons are here? How many sentences? How many editors?!]
HAMLET'S TRAGIC FLAW: Is Hamlet's distress understandable? Why does he fail to act until too late? Some of the most important interpretations of Hamlet's tragic flaw are:
Goethe: The great German poet argued that Hamlet is not brave enough. He lacks the "right stuff." The dramatic situation is like an acorn (the problem) planted in a cracked vase (Hamlet). As the problem grows, Hamlet becomes less sound.
A.C. Bradley: This famous Shakespeare scholar said that Hamlet suffers from melancholia or is merely mentally deranged.
Ernest Jones: The Freudian interpretation--Oedipus complex. He still has a childish sexual fixation on Gertrude. Thus, his attitude toward Claudius is ambivalent; he is grateful to Claudius for removing his "rival" for his mother's affections (King Hamlet) but must also resent him as his new father-figure.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Hamlet's delay is caused by "the effect of a superfluous activity of thought." He thinks too much because he is too elevated for this world, has too fine a character.
A more general interpretation is that Hamlet does not have a flaw. He is merely waiting for the ghost to be proven honest or not. In this he may be seen as a twentieth century existentialist hero. He is faced with a problem whose answer may lie beyond the limits of human reason--or in fact may not have an answer. It is this limitation, and the uncertainty it produces, that makes Hamlet "unstable."
Helen Gardner: Hamlet is a true revenge play: In a typical revenge play the protagonist must kill the slayer of his relative or friend in the most terrible way possible.
a. The hero faces a predicament not of his own making.
b. The villain provides the means for the vengeance (Claudius suggests the duel).
c. The avenger conceives a plot and puts it into action.
d. Usually the hero descends to the moral level of the man being punished (a mild
irony) with a terrible revenge scheme (Hamlet may not do this).
e. The denouement of Hamlet shows a "profound" irony: Claudius plans Hamlet's death, but both he and his queen die. The tragedy here does not lie in the unfitness of the hero for his task. He, according to Gardner, has no flaw. The flaw is in the task itself (is it beyond any man?) or in the nature of the world (is perfect justice impossible in the world?). The task itself is one only a hero would feel called upon to undertake--like charging the machine gun nest to save your buddies, raising children, teaching English.
Productions of the play generally use one or more of the above interpretations to present Hamlet’s character. (Both the Laurence Olivier and the Mel Gibson Hamlets are products of Ernest Jones’ argument that Hamlet suffers an Oedipus Complex.) Although I have shown both of these films and the Kenneth Branaugh version in their entirety—at different times—the Mel Gibson film is the shortest (135 minutes) and perhaps the most accessible for the students. Scenes ranging from the opening scene to the poison-duel resolution could be chosen for contrast, but I prefer Act 3, Scene 4, where Hamlet kills Polonius and the ghost appears. This scene is the play’s climax and involves whatever interpretation of the tragic flaw the actor chooses. A scene that could be chosen just to show contrasts in staging is Act 3, Scene 3, where Claudius is attempting to pray.
A study of Hamlet’s tragic flaw certainly does not exhaust the attractions of this play. Other characters die—are their deaths justified? King Hamlet has called upon his son for revenge, but the biblical imagery within the play surely reminds us that revenge is the province of the divine and raises the question, is the Ghost’s very request somehow wrong? (Hamlet initially questions the prudence of heeding the ghost’s demand.) Why do Gertrude and Ophelia so willingly give in to the authority of the males? Should Hamlet’s friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern die for helping the king and queen? Does Polonius deserve to die when hiding behind the arras?
SHAKESPEARE’S THEMES
An equally direct approach to the play is possible through a study of Shakespeare’s themes. This can be the basis for a closer study of the language Shakespeare chooses for his text. In Macbeth Shakespeare makes use of an idea Alexander Pope will later call the Great Chain of Being. Everything that exists has a place in an orderly universe that ranges from the lowest being (Aristotle identified it as “unformed matter”) to the highest (God). Man’s immoral acts upset that chain and cause disruptions in Nature. (A twentieth century Hollywood movie, Shane, may make use of that idea in the fight scene between Shane and his host—both good men—when they clash over who will face the bad gunman in town. The sky outside the cabin grows dark, apparently because good men are fighting each other rather than evil, and clears again when the victorious Shane rides to the gunfight.) In a much more exaggerated fashion Shakespeare has the unnatural acts of Macbeth disturb the heavens and cause animals to behave unnaturally (horses are reported to eat each other on the night the king is killed). Hamlet alludes to this concept only once, when talking of Rome, Julius Caesar, and the “sheeted dead” that roamed the streets in the days before Caesar’s assassination. In Hamlet Shakespeare explores the idea in a more “realistic” manner. The kingdom is disturbed politically and morally. Denmark is preparing for war, a ghost appears early in the play, and the king and queen are united in an incestuous relationship!
Other religious ideas dominate the play. The king’s death, related in the play by the ghost, invokes the Garden of Eden of Genesis. The king is asleep in the “orchard” (garden) and is supposedly bitten by a snake when Claudius poisons him. The act of brother killing brother recalls another story from Genesis, Cain killing Abel, which Claudius echoes in the famous prayer scene (3.3). This echoes in Hamlet’s declaration that the world is “an unweeded garden” and is part of the background that heightens Hamlet’s reasoning when he is debating whether to kill Claudius as he is “praying” and is significant in the drama’s distinctions between appearance and reality.
The method Claudius chooses to kill his brother provides a central metaphor for the kingdom being “poisoned”; poison and its effects provide much of the most effective language in the play, from “unweeded garden” (1.2.135) and “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark” (1.4.90) of Act 1 to the poisoned pearl of Act 5. But the dramatic uses of poison are even more striking. From the murder of the king to the “poisoned” plot of Laertes and Claudius, from the poisoned mind of the mad Ophelia to the poisoning of Hamlet and the death of Claudius by poisoned sword and poisoned pearl, Shakespeare has wonderfully illustrated the consequences of the ambitious murder of Kind Hamlet by Claudius.

shakespeare tools

The Language of Shakespeare
(from the Shakespeare resource center http://www.bardweb.net/language.html)

SRC Exclusives

The most striking feature of Shakespeare is his command of language. It is all the more astounding when one not only considers Shakespeare's sparse formal education but the curriculum of the day. There were no dictionaries; the first such lexical work for speakers of English was compiled by schoolmaster Robert Cawdrey as A Table Alphabeticall in 1604. Although certain grammatical treatises were published in Shakespeare's day, organized grammar texts would not appear until the 1700s. Shakespeare as a youth would have no more systematically studied his own language than any educated man of the period.
Despite this, Shakespeare is credited by the Oxford English Dictionary with the introduction of nearly 3,000 words into the language. His vocabulary, as culled from his works, numbers upward of 17,000 words (quadruple that of an average, well-educated conversationalist in the language). In the words of Louis Marder, "Shakespeare was so facile in employing words that he was able to use over 7,000 of them—more than occur in the whole King James version of the Bible—only once and never again."

Shakespeare's English, in spite of the calamitous cries of high school students everywhere, is only one linguistic generation removed from that which we speak today. Although the Elizabethan dialect differs slightly from Modern English, the principles are generally the same. There are some (present day) anomalies with prepositional usage and verb agreement, and certainly a number of Shakespeare's words have shifted meanings or dropped, with age, from the present vocabulary. Word order, as the language shifted from Middle to Early Modern English, was still a bit more flexible, and Shakespeare wrote dramatic poetry, not standard prose, which gave some greater license in expression. However, Elizabethan remains a sibling of our own tongue, and hence, accessible.

This facility with language, and the art with which he employed its usage, is why Shakespeare is as relevant today as he was in his own time.

Language Links
CliffsNotes—Shakespeare Glossary
A glossary of Shakespearean terms from the people who have made a living out of students who don't want to read the plays for themselves.
Dictionary of Shakespeare
A selective dictionary of Shakepearean words that have fallen out of use, or whose meanings have changed over the centuries.
Elizabethan English
Topics include sounds and sentences, puns and word-play, Shakespeare's pronunciation, and prose and verse.
Elizabethan English as a literary medium
From Bartleby.com. A look at the literary use of Elizabethan English.
The Elizabethan Glossary (About.com)
An Elizabethan glossary giving the meanings of old and unusual words used in Shakespeare's England.
History of the English Language
A (very) brief history of the English language from EnglishClub.com.
Proper Elizabethan Accents
A brief introduction to how people's speech in Elizabethan England actually sounded, their vocabulary, and grammar. Includes a table for constructing Shakespearean insults.
Reading Shakespeare's Language
The New Folger Library Shakespeare presents some overview resources to help guide students in reading Shakespeare.
Shakespeare 101
Amy Ulen has a guide meant to help Shakespeare newbies with the language of the Bard. Includes a mini-glossary.
Shakespeare and the Development Of Modern English
This article from No Sweat Shakespeare discusses the shift from Middle to Early Modern English .
Shakespeare Concordance
Type in a word, and this search engine will find all the instances of that word in Shakespeare's works.
Shakespeare Lexicon
Alexander Schmidt's Lexicon and Quotation Dictionary is a painstakingly compiled glossary of every word in the Shakespeare corpus and an exhaustive collection of quotations. It has long been a standard reference work.
A Shakespearian Grammar
A great Internet edition of a classic work by Edwin Abbott, a Headmaster of the City of London School. Although first published in 1879, this is still a very good (if highly academic) comparative study of Elizabethan syntax versus Modern English.