Prescanned Shakespeare.com
presented by Acoustic Learning

On this site you will find the complete works of William Shakespeare— pre-scanned. 

Shakespeare wrote primarily in verse.  Verse is language arranged into rhythmic patterns, such as

Scanning is the process of finding a verse's rhythm.  To find the rhythm of a verse, you scan through its lines, and you figure out which syllables are long (or "stressed") and which are short (or "unstressed").  Once you have scanned the lines, you make marks to indicate the syllables' lengths.  A system of marks that show a scanned rhythm is called scansion.  The purpose of marking scansion is to make rhythm visible.

This resource is not meant to be "authoritative," because there are many different ways to interpret a text.  Rather, they are offered as examples of how each text may be naturally spoken and still be rhythmical.

The scansion used on this site is derived from the work of Edgar Allan Poe.  Poe explained verse rhythm in his essay "The Rationale of Verse," and the foundations of his theory have now been used to create Scansion Made Simple, an easy-to-read instruction manual that explains how to analyze the rhythmical patterns of verse.

Please read further about how the scansion is applied in these texts or about how to interpret the marks.  Feel free to write eartraining [a]t aruffo d[ot] com if you have any questions!