Did you find the play in an Anthology?:
Shakespeare, William. The Tragedie of Troylus and Cressida. The Applause First Folio of Shakespeare in Modern Type, edited and annotated by Neil Freeman, 2001, pp. 569-597.
Is it a stand-alone book?
Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. Yale UP, 2006.
To avoid awkward or repetitive citation in your paper, you may abbreviate Shakespeare's works. Use the full title the first time you mention the play, and then use abbreviations after that. Here are some standard abbreviations:
| Ado | Much Ado about Nothing | JC | Julius Caesar |
| Ant. | Antony and Cleopatra | Jn. | King John |
| AWW | All's Well That Ends Well | LLL | Love's Labour's Lost |
| AYL | As You Like It | Mac. | Macbeth |
| Cor. | Coriolanus | MM | Measure for Measure |
| Cym. | Cymbeline | MND | A Midsummer Night's Dream |
| Err. | The Comedy of Errors | MV | The Merchant of Venice |
| F1 | First Folio edition (1623) | Oth. | Othello |
| F2 | Second Folio edition (1632) | R2 | Richard II |
| Ham. | Hamlet | R3 | Richard III |
| 1H4 | Henry IV, Part 1 | Rom. | Romeo and Juliet |
| 2H4 | Henry IV, Part 2 | Shr. | The Taming of the Shrew |
| H5 | Henry V | Son. | Sonnets |
| 1H6 | Henry IV, Part 1 | TGV | The Two Gentlemen of Verona |
| 2H6 | Henry VI, Part 2 | Tit. | Titus Andronicus |
| 3H6 | Henry VI, Part 3 | Tmp. | The Tempest |
| H8 | Henry VIII | TN | Twelfth Night |
| Tro. | Troilus and Cressida | ||
| Wiv. | The Merry Wives of Windsor | ||
| WT | The Winter's Tale |
1. When you quote from a play, divide lines of verse with slashes the way you would if quoting poetry.
2. Your in-text citation refer to Act, scene, and line numbers -- not page numbers. The period goes after the parenthetical reference.
EXAMPLE: In A Midsummer Night's Dream, Theseus draws a comparison that: "The lunatic, the lover, and the poet, / Are of imagination all compact" (V. i.7-8).
EXAMPLE: In Twelfth Night, Feste the clown sums up the play's world view when he says, "Nothing that is so, is so" (IV.1.7).
EXAMPLE: Early in the play, Viola reminds us that Shakespeare's fools often behave the most rationally and give the wisest counsel of any players when she refers to Feste, "This fellow is wise enough to play the fool, / And to do that well craves a kind of wit" (III.1.56-57).
3. Verse quotations of more than three lines in length need to begin on a new line, and the whole block is indented, as in any block quotation. The parenthetical citation, located at the end of the verse quotation and after the end punctuation, will include the initials of the play's name and the line numbers (unless previously mentioned in text).
EXAMPLE: Duke Orsino, frustrated in his pursuit of Olivia, asks his musicians to overload him with music (the "food of love"), and in so doing, remove his appetite for love the way overeating removes one's appetite for food:
If music be the food of love, play on,
Give me excess of it, that surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.
That strain again, it had a dying fall.
O it came o'er my ear, like the sweet sound
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odor. Enough, no more,
'Tis not so sweet now as it was before. (TN. I. 1. 1-8)
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