Template:Folger Shakespeare/doc

This is a documentation subpage for Template:Folger Shakespeare. It may contain usage information, categories and other content that is not part of the original template page.

This template uses Lua: Module:Folger Shakespeare (sandbox) Module:Folger Shakespeare/config Module:Folger Shakespeare/plays

This template is for creating short inline citations to William Shakespeare's plays in the digital editions made available by the Folger Shakespeare Library. It's patterned on {{sfn}} and meant to be used as an inline citation in the text of articles that need to reference the plays' text as a primary source.

{{sfd|play|act|scene|line}}

All arguments are required.

The first positional (unnamed) argument is one of the known names for the play configured in Module:Folger Shakespeare/plays. For most plays this is just the same as the Wikipedia article, but for some plays there are convenience aliases like 3H6 for Henry VI, Part 3.

The second and third arguments are the numerical act and scene, both given as arabic (not roman) numerals.

The last argument is either a single line number, or a line number range with the start and end of the range delimited with either a normal hyphen (-) or an en-dash (–). Em-dashes are not supported and the dash is always unspaced.

• {{sfd|1H4|4|2|12–13}} → ^[1]
• "To be or not to be"{{sfd|Hamlet|3|1|64}} → "To be or not to be"^[2]

The Folger Shakespeare digital texts are not, despite early assurances, very stable. The Folger doesn't provide persistent identifiers for the lay texts, and act/scene/line targets do not come with API-like guarantees. That means every time they redesign their website this template needs to be updated. Thankfully the concept of looking up play, act, scene, and line is pretty fundamental and universal so it's unlikely they'll change the website in such a way that this template can't be updated to support it.

The template currently does not support linking to stage directions, speech prefixes, prologues, and similar. At least some of these may be possible to support in the future.

The template also currently doesn't support so-called Folger Through-Line Numbers (ftln). This is planned for the future, but hasn't been added yet.