William Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night's Dream


Distribution by Speakers

This form generates a request to TACTweb that results in a display which shows how the selected positions are distributed between characters in the play. It is included as an example of how one might create a specialized query request form.

Your Query:

Query Context: Before: After:

Normalized Distribution by Speakers

This form generates a display similar to the one above, except that the length of each column in the graph takes into account not only the number of times words in the speaker's speech fits the selection criteria, but also how often the speaker speaks in the entire play.

Your Query:

Query Context: Before: After:

Trying out alternative ordering of the KWIC display

This form generates a TACTweb KWIC display. Within the KWIC display, the form gives you a choice about how the selected positions are to be organized. We've given you a sample query which selects words which occur just before the word "moon". The standard form, when given this request, will generate a KWIC display sorted by position of occurrence within the text. If the Display ordering of "alphabetical" is selected, the selected words will instead be ordered by headword.

Your Query:

Query Context: Before: After:

KWIC Display ordering:

For more on the Query Syntax, you should look at the Help on Query Syntax screen.


The text of A Midsummer Night's Dream was taken from The Online Book Initiative (OBI). The OBI is a project to make a large collection of freely redistributable text available in a common format for others to do with as they like. This text was used because, according to the OBI, it was not encumbered by copyright.

Although the text came from the OBI collection, the pagination is based on The Complete Oxford Shakespeare, edited by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford University Press: Oxford 1978).




Web design Alex Stevens, content Geoffrey Rockwell, John Bradley, or Gord Roberts. June, 1998.