Shakespeare Repackaged

In the newly independent India and even some time before that, the British education pattern had been adopted and is still largely followed today. There are a lot interesting stories about how the clever Indian folk grappled with the King's English.

My dad told me this one ...

One of them is when a young schoolboy approached a book shop and spent some time searching for a book. After a while he scratched his head asked the shopkeeper "Kya aapke paas 'Maimne ki dum se hilti Naashpati' hai?". The shopkeeper quietly picked up a book handed it to the boy, and pocketed the payment. Once the boy had left, the shocked shopkeeper's assistant asked, "Which book did you give him?". "Lamb's Tales of Shakespeare", replied the shopkeeper.

For my non-Hindi speaking readers, the boy had asked (rough translation) "Do you have the book - lamb's tail shakes the pear (tree)?"

Shakespeare's work in now out of copyright and available to the general public, without any lawyer breathing down their neck! Yaaay! This now also means that anybody can now repackage Shakespeare's content in their own context and present it. Uh-Oh!

Some of the sites offering Shakespeare's work are

• Google Books
  
• Project Gutenberg
  
• Wikisource
  
• The Literature Network
  
• Internet Public Library
  
• williamshakespearefulltext.com
  
• william-shakespeare.info
  
• Interestingly Shakespeare Oxford Society, The Shakespeare Society, Britannica, Encarta and so on do not seem to provide the texts freely or easily. Perhaps they are avoiding a duplication of effort.
  
• and so on ...
  

I wonder when Mickey Mouse comes out of copyright! ;)