That Shakespeare Font

Many years ago I found a free font produced by the Illinois Shakespeare Festival.  It was a true type font (of the old style), freely available, and called something like 'Illinois Shakespeare Font,' or 'First Folio Font.'"  (The truth is I really couldn't remember what it was called, but guessed.)  It was an approximation of the title fonts used by Elizabethan and Jacobean typesetters, the one we are so familiar with from numerous quarto title pages. 

I produced some graphics using this font and over time, whilst my busy care attended to other matters, as it were, lost it.  (The truth, once again, was that it was--I'm fairly certain--the victim of one of many hard drive crashes where I forgot to restore the fonts when painstakingly restoring the rest of the data from defunct drives).  This I regret, because I have had several requests for it over the years.  Now, by happy coincidence, I have stumbled across it again, and want to point anyone interested in simulated early English type fonts to it.  It can be downloaded from dafont.com (for free) at the following URL:

http://www.dafont.com/il-shake-fest.font

As it turns out, it is called "IlShakeFest."  It comes accompanied (indeed, one of the requirements of distributing it is to make sure it comes with) a readme file that explains that it was produced in 1996 by Scott Mann and Peter Guither.  In fact, the readme.txt file even has a promotion for the 1996 season's festival.  The URL it gives for the festival is long dead, though I hope the font builders are not.  Be sure to read the readme.txt file after downloading, unzipping and installing the font file.  It contains information on keyboard shortcuts (that DO NOT WORK with Word on XP or Vista, but do work on the Mac) that would otherwise be mysterious.  As you can see from the sample at the right, where I show the three types of lower case "s" and the upper case "S," then mimic (with some kerning) a line from the First Folio, it does a reasonable job of simulating the type used in part of that dedication page.

The workaround for adding the variations on "s" in Word on the PC is to insert symbol and pick from the font set, then copy.

At long last I can fulfill the requests that I have received over the years.

By the way, the correct URL for the Illinois Shakespeare Festival--which no longer makes mention of the font, is http://www.thefestival.org/.  It looks like they have a terrific season planned.  I wish I could be there.