Notes to Worlds Elsewhere
I decided against printing a full list of academic notes in the published edition of Worlds Elsewhere, partly for space reasons – the book is bulky enough – but also because I felt that anyone wanting to chase up references might find it easier if they were available digitally. So here they are.
Rather than providing an arid list of citations, my hope is that these notes will be a guide to fruitful further research. To that end, I have tried to be clear as to where I derived a piece of information, then direct the reader to the primary or secondary source where I found it.
Page numbers and key phrases in my text are marked in bold, followed by references. For ease of use – and to avoid generating thousands of interlinked footnotes – I have avoided giving specific page citations each and every time I reference a source, instead pointing the way to the resources I found most valuable in relevant sections. Where possible, I’ve tried to refer to sources that are online. The reader is encouraged to use these notes as a companion to my Select Bibliography [pdf], which directs the way to other useful research tools in global Shakespeare (films, websites, etc etc).
Unless otherwise stated, citations from Shakespeare are keyed to Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (eds), The Complete Works, 2nd edition (Oxford, 2005). I’ve generally resisted modernising the spelling of other historical texts and sources, unless there is good reason to.