Shakespeare Pro

“It’s really great!”
—Kenneth Branagh, actor and director

“I can't remember a time it wasn't on my iPhone. So feature rich!"
—Stephen Fry, actor and writer

“‘The app’s the thing.’ Hamlet was almost right. Great to see Shakespeare Pro superplaying with Shakespeare’s plays.”
—David Crystal, linguist and author of Shakespeare's Words

“The Shakespeare Pro app is simply terrific and filled with loads of wonderful information!”
—Ken Ludwig, Tony and Olivier Award Winning Playwright

Shakespeare Pro® includes the complete works of Shakespeare (41 plays, 154 sonnets and 6 poems, including apocrypha) and search the concordance to find the exact word or phrase you’re looking for (with “relaxed” searching to find words close to your search term).

Shakespeare Pro is packed with these impressive features:

••• QUALITY TEXTS are a top priority and our team spent years compiling and editing the best references available. In the updated editions, the text is even more clear and each individual character is uniquely identified.

••• FIRST FOLIOS AND QUARTOS in original spelling show the works as they were originally published in Shakespeare’s time.

••• AN INTEGRATED GLOSSARY, based on the bestselling lexicon by David & Ben Crystal, Shakespeare’s Words™ is included. Simply tapping on a word will display its definition in context (not just a general definition).

••• ADD YOUR OWN NOTES AND SHARE THEM with your students, classmates, friends, and colleagues. Organize your notes into notebooks for use in the classroom, theatre, or just to remember key facts. Then share them via email or AirDrop.

••• POWER SEARCH THE WORKS by customizing multiple parameters like gender, genre, work, language, line form, soliloquies, and more.

••• CUSTOMIZE YOUR READING EXPERIENCE by choosing from a variety of color themes, change the font family and size, display long or short character names, jump around to different scenes, and view line numbers (*read the note below about line numbering).

••• BOOKMARK YOUR FAVORITE PARTS in addition to remembering the last page you viewed. Even copy/paste that great line.

••• DETAILED SCENE BREAKDOWNS give you an overview of the scenes within each play, their locations, and the characters present in each.

••• CHARACTER DESCRIPTIONS help you better understand the actions and motivations of every character—all 1,155 of them.

••• MODERN TRANSLATIONS and lexicons to help you better understand Elizabethan English (extra add-ons).

••• GET THE FACTS by reading up on Shakespeare’s life, view data and chronology about his works, and an overview of scansion terminology or rhetoric. Character Arc Visualizers show individual character arcs or allow for comparison of multiple characters.

••• SHAKE YOUR DEVICE for Shakespeare himself to display a random memorable quote or insult. Or get a new random quote every day.

••• BROWSE THE GALLERY of famous Shakespeare portraits.

••• TEACHER CURRICULUM makes it easy for teachers to introduce students to Shakespeare's works.

••• COMPLETE APOCRYPHA is the most comprehensive breakdown of 14 plays Shakespeare may have had a hand in.

••• BARDFIND™ is the easiest way to find a Shakespeare theatre or venue anywhere in the world.

These are just a few highlights of the great things in Shakespeare Pro. If you’re a student, professor, actor, or just plain love the Bard, this must-have app ensures you have the complete works at your fingertips.

Like the new features? Having trouble and need support? Let us know at support@playshakespeare.com or at http://support.playshakespeare.com.

We fixed a few small bugs and small improvements to make your Shakespearean life a little better. :)

Did you catch the recent update? We made the historical editions (folios, quartos, octavos) the main focus, including:

• NEW! Scroll sync: when using compare view to compare two editions, enabling sync now keeps the two views in sync to make comparing lines easier
• NEW! Scene markers: most historical editions don't have act/scene divisions, but they now have markers where modern act/scene divisions are to help you navigate
• NEW! Updated scene menu: historical editions now have full act/scene list for navigation (see the Help section to understand the format)
• NEW! Compare view is now available on iPhone Pro Max (previously only available on iPad)
• NEW! Characters are now categorized by major, supporting, etc.
• Improved Mac experience
• Improved overall legibility of the historical editions
• Improvements to the Help section
• Improvements to accessibility
• Search optimizations for complex queries, new search scenes
• Improved TEI compatibility
• Small usability improvements and some bug squashing

We've compiled some historical milestones for those interested:

• October 2007: The Web version was created for the original iPhone which provided the complete works.
• July 2008: Shakespeare 1.0 went live, one of only 500 apps on the Apple App Store when it launched. There are over 1.8 million apps available today.
• December 2009: Shakespeare Pro features were introduced, including a glossary and advanced search.
• April 2010: Shakespeare hits 1 million downloads.
• July 2016: Shakespeare Pro for Mac 1.0 released.
• May 2023: Shakespeare and Shakespeare Pro apps pass 30 million downloads.
• December 2024: We released Shakespeare 9.3.1, our final update in 2024 and the 105th update to the app since 2008.
• January 1, 2025: To date, we've supported 46 different models (16 generations) of the iPhone, 30 different models (10 generations) of the iPad, and 238 iOS/iPadOS updates.