Shakespeare Wiki — Schema & Conventions
Purpose
This wiki is a knowledge base for the complete works of William Shakespeare, sourced from the Project Gutenberg eBook #100: The Complete Works of William Shakespeare.
Page Types
| Type | Location | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
concept |
concepts/ |
Categories, themes, genres, and analytical frameworks |
entity |
entities/ |
Individual plays, the Sonnets, and poems |
source |
sources/ |
Summary of each ingested raw source |
query |
queries/ |
Answered research questions worth preserving |
overview |
overview.md |
High-level synthesis across all works |
Frontmatter Fields
Every page includes:
---
title: Page Title
type: concept | entity | source | query | overview
tags: [tag1, tag2]
created: YYYY-MM-DD
updated: YYYY-MM-DD
sources: [raw/pg100.txt]
---
Entity Page Structure (Plays)
Each play entity page follows this structure:
1. Summary — 1-2 sentence overview
2. At a Glance — genre, approximate date, setting
3. Dramatis Personæ — complete cast from the source text
4. Plot Summary — act-by-act synopsis
5. Key Themes — major thematic concerns
6. Notable Quotations — famous lines
7. Cross-references — wikilinks to concepts and related plays
Entity Page Structure (Characters)
Each character entity page follows this structure:
1. Play - The play in which the character appears
2. Summary - 1-2 sentence overview of the character
3. Notable Quotations - famous lines (if any)
4. Cross References -- wikilinks to concepts and play entities.
Wikilinks
Cross-references use [[Page Title]] syntax, e.g., [[Hamlet]] or [[Tragedies]].
Chronological Organization
Plays are organized by approximate date of first performance. Dates are scholarly consensus estimates; exact dates are often uncertain.
Genre Taxonomy
- Comedies — romantic comedies with happy endings, often featuring disguise, mistaken identity, and marriage
- Tragedies — plays ending in death and catastrophe, driven by fatal flaws
- Histories — plays dramatizing English (and occasionally Roman) history
- Romances (Late Plays) — tragi-comedies featuring redemption, reconciliation, and the supernatural; written ~1607–1614
- Problem Plays — works that resist easy genre classification (All's Well, Measure for Measure, Troilus and Cressida)