An Agent Skill that teaches coding agents to speak
and write like William Shakespeare, backed by a bundled corpus of 14 plays and
the complete sonnets — plus bard, a portable static Go binary for searching
them.
The skill works with opencode, Claude Code, Gemini CLI, and any
other client that follows the open Agent Skills standard (SKILL.md with
name and description frontmatter).
User: talk like Shakespeare and explain what a git rebase does
Agent: Good morrow, gentle friend. A rebase doth lift thy commits from
their old foundation and set them anew upon another branch, as one
might transplant a rose to fresher soil. Where once thy history
forked, it shall run straight and true. Anon!
- What's inside
- Repository layout
- Install: opencode
- Install: Claude Code
- Install: Gemini CLI
- Install: other Agent Skills clients
- Using the bardCLI
- Bundled works
- Development
- Publishing
- License and attribution
- skills/shakespeare/SKILL.md— the skill itself: grammar rules, vocabulary tables, iambic-pentameter guidance, rhetorical figures, register selection, guardrails, and a workflow for looking things up.
- skills/shakespeare/references/— the cleaned plays and sonnets plus a deep- style-guide.mdand- insults.md.
- skills/shakespeare/assets/sonnet-template.md— a sonnet scaffold.
- bard— a dependency-free static binary that searches an embedded index of ~14,000 spoken lines: by phrase, character, act/scene, or sonnet, and generates Shakespearean insults. Built with- CGO_ENABLED=0, so one binary runs anywhere.
Progressive disclosure keeps this cheap: until the skill is triggered, only
its name and description occupy context. The 2 MB of plays are read only when
needed, and bard means the agent rarely needs to read them at all.
shakespeare-skill/
├── skills/shakespeare/
│ ├── SKILL.md # the skill (Agent Skills format)
│ ├── references/
│ │ ├── plays/*.txt # normalized plays (generated)
│ │ ├── poems/sonnets.txt # normalized sonnets (generated)
│ │ ├── style-guide.md # deep grammar/meter/rhetoric reference
│ │ └── insults.md # insult tables + canonical examples
│ ├── assets/sonnet-template.md
│ └── scripts/README.md # how to install/build bard
├── cmd/bard/ # CLI entry point
├── cmd/normalize/ # regenerates references + index
├── internal/
│ ├── normalizer/ # edition-aware Gutenberg parser
│ ├── corpus/ # data model, works manifest, queries
│ └── index/ # go:embed of corpus.jsonl
├── sources/gutenberg/*.txt # raw Project Gutenberg sources
├── .claude-plugin/ # Claude Code plugin + marketplace manifests
├── gemini-extension.json # Gemini CLI extension manifest
├── opencode.json # sample opencode config (skills.paths)
├── Makefile
├── .goreleaser.yaml
└── .github/workflows/ # ci.yml + release.yml
opencode discovers skills from .opencode/skills/<name>/SKILL.md,
.claude/skills/, and .agents/skills/ in the project, and the matching
directories under ~/.config/opencode and ~/.claude. It also accepts extra
paths via skills.paths.
Option A — point opencode at this repo (global). Add the absolute path to
~/.config/opencode/opencode.json:
{
"$schema": "https://opencode.ai/config.json",
"skills": {
"paths": ["/absolute/path/to/shakespeare-skill/skills"]
}
}Option B — copy the skill in place (global):
mkdir -p ~/.config/opencode/skills
cp -R skills/shakespeare ~/.config/opencode/skills/Option C — reuse the Claude/agent path. opencode auto-loads
~/.claude/skills/ and ~/.agents/skills/:
mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills
cp -R skills/shakespeare ~/.claude/skills/Configuration is loaded once at startup: quit and restart opencode after
installing. Then ask something that triggers the skill ("talk like Shakespeare
about indexing") or reference it by name. opencode exposes skills through its
skill tool, so the agent loads the body on demand.
The opencode.json at the root of this repository already points to ./skills
for running inside the checkout.
Claude Code reads skills from ~/.claude/skills/ (personal) and
.claude/skills/ (project). Skills are auto-invoked when relevant, or run
explicitly with /<skill-name>.
Personal install:
mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills
cp -R skills/shakespeare ~/.claude/skills/Project install (committed for the whole team):
mkdir -p .claude/skills
cp -R /path/to/shakespeare-skill/skills/shakespeare .claude/skills/Plugin install (this repo is already a plugin + marketplace):
/plugin marketplace add cookiengineer/shakespeare-skill
/plugin install shakespeare
Then use it automatically ("write this commit message as Shakespeare"), or invoke it directly:
/shakespeare
Gemini CLI discovers skills from .gemini/skills/ (workspace),
~/.gemini/skills/ (user), and the cross-tool aliases .agents/skills/ and
~/.agents/skills/. It prompts for consent before activating a skill.
Install from Git:
gemini skills install https://github.com/cookiengineer/shakespeare-skill.git --path skills/shakespeare --consentOr link a local checkout for development:
gemini skills link /path/to/shakespeare-skill/skills/shakespeare --scope userOr bundle as an extension (this repo ships gemini-extension.json):
gemini extensions install https://github.com/cookiengineer/shakespeare-skillCheck what loaded with /skills list, then ask Gemini to speak like
Shakespeare; it activates the skill automatically.
The skill folder is portable. Copy skills/shakespeare/ into whatever
directory your client scans for Agent Skills (for example Cursor, GitHub
Copilot, and OpenHands use .agents/skills/ or an equivalent configured
path). The only hard requirement is that SKILL.md sits in a folder named
shakespeare and starts with the name/description frontmatter, which it
does.
Download a prebuilt static binary from GitHub Releases, or build it:
make build # -> bin/bard
# or, without make:
CGO_ENABLED=0 go build -trimpath -o bard ./cmd/bardPut it on PATH (or in skills/shakespeare/scripts/) and the skill will use
it automatically. Every command accepts --json for machine-readable output.
Examples:
$ bard search "not to be" --work hamlet --limit 1
Hamlet, Act III, Scene I
Ham: To be, or not to be, that is the question: ...
$ bard speaker macbeth --work macbeth --limit 1
Macbeth, Act I, Scene III
Macb: So foule and faire a day I haue not seene
$ bard insult
Thou roguish swag-bellied barnacle!Requirements: Go 1.23+ and (optionally) make.
make normalize # regenerate references/ and internal/index/corpus.jsonl
make test # go test ./...
make vet # go vet ./...
make build # static binary at bin/bard
make check # fmt + vet + test + build (what CI runs)
make cross # local cross-compiled binaries for linux/darwin/windowsHow normalization works. The raw Project Gutenberg files vary wildly:
uppercase SPEAKER. lines, underscored _Speaker._ italic editions, First
Folio spellings ( Lenox., Actus Primus. Scoena Prima.), and the
numbered sonnets. internal/normalizer detects the edition (recorded in the
works manifest), strips the Gutenberg boilerplate, line numbers, footnote
markers, and italic marks, and emits both a readable text file and structured
{work, act, scene, speaker, text} records. internal/index embeds the
resulting corpus.jsonl with go:embed, so bard needs no external files.
Adding a work. Drop the raw file in sources/gutenberg/, add an entry to
corpus.Works in internal/corpus/corpus.go with its edition and slug, run
make normalize, and commit the generated output.
CI runs gofmt, go vet, the test suite, a static build, a smoke test, and
an idempotence check that fails if make normalize produces a diff.
-
Push the repository to GitHub.
-
Tag a release; the releaseworkflow runs GoReleaser and attachesbardarchives for Linux, macOS, and Windows (amd64/arm64) to the GitHub release.git tag v1.0.0 git push origin v1.0.0
-
For Claude Code, the repository already contains .claude-plugin/so it can be added as a plugin marketplace (/plugin marketplace add <owner>/<repo>).
-
For Gemini CLI, submit the extension to the gallery following Google's extension releasing guide.
-
For the broader Agent Skills ecosystem, the skills/shakespeare/folder is already in the standard layout; list it wherever the community indexes skills.
- Code and manifests: MIT (see LICENSE).
- Authored prose and data (SKILL.md,style-guide.md,insults.md, the sonnet template): CC0-1.0.
- Literary texts: William Shakespeare's works are in the public domain.
The raw files in sources/gutenberg/are Project Gutenberg eBooks and remain under the Project Gutenberg License; the normalized texts are derivatives of those files. SeeTHIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.mdfor the required notice and per-work attribution. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark and does not endorse this project.