Pericles was one of the most popular plays of its time, and it has regained much of that popularity today. In a wide-ranging introduction, Roger Warren draws on his experience of the play in rehearsal and performance to explore the reasons for this enduring popularity. Unfortunately Pericles survives only in a corrupt text, the Quarto of 1609, in which many passages are nonsensical and others appear to be missing altogether. Earlier editions have merely cleaned-up the Quarto, but this edition offers a conjectural reconstruction of what the original play...

A Comedy of Errors is Shakespeare's shortest play yet one of his most popular comedies. Here is a new modern-spelling edition, based on the 1623 Folio text with on-page commentary and notes that explain meaning, staging, language and allusions. A detailed and informative introduction describes the play's first performance at Gray's Inn in December 1594, its multiple sources and its uneven critical and theatrical history. Appendices include the complete text of the play's main source, Plautus' Menaechmi, and extracts from Gesta Grayorum and the Geneva Bible. Illustrated with production...

Timon of Athens is a bitterly intriguing study of a fabulously rich man who wastes his wealth on his friends, and, when he is finally impoverished, learns to despise humanity with a hatred that drives him to his grave. The play's plot structure is schematically clear, and the poetry of Timon's rage is arresting in its savage intensity. Yet readers have often detected loose ends, and the tone of writing is uneven. In his introduction, John Jowett explains how these characteristics arise because the play was written as a collaboration between Shakespeare and Thomas Middleton. This...

Based on Chaucer's Knight's Tale, The Two Noble Kinsmen was written at the end of Shakespeare's career, as a collaboration with the rising young dramatist John Fletcher. Neglected until recently by directors and teachers, the play deserves to be better known for its moving dramatization of the conflict of love and friendship. This new edition, compiled by distinguished scholar Eugene M. Waith, offers helpful new material on the play's authenticity as a work of Shakespeare, his collaboration with Fletcher, the relevance to the play of the contemporary ideals of chivalry and friendship, and its...

The Winter's Tale is Shakespeare's most fully realized tragicomedy, noted for the richness and complexity of its poetry. Though the title may suggest an escapist fantasy, recent criticism has seen in the play a profoundly realistic psychology and a keen commentary on the violence implicit in family relationships and deep friendships. Orgel traces the changing critical and theatrical attitudes towards the play, and places its psychological and dramatic conflicts within the Jacobean cultural and political context. This edition is made complete with a reprint of Shakespeare's source for the...

Shakespeare's Henry VI plays dramatize contemporary as much as Elizabethan issues: the struggle for power, the manoeuvres of politicians, social unrest, civil war. This edition draws on experience of the play in rehearsal and performance to focus on both its theatricality and contemporary relevance in a wide-ranging introduction and detailed commentary.

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This is the first fully annotated modern-spelling edition of King Henry VIII to appear for over a decade and includes up-to-date scholarship on all aspects of the play, including dating authorship, printing, sources and stage history. The editor accepts the view that the play is a collaboration between Shakespeare and Fletcher. Unique to this edition is the frequent reference to Cavendish's biography of Wolsey, neglected in earlier editions. This edition includes a fully detailed commentary and a selective collation of major variant readings appear immediately beneath the text....

Richard III is one of Shakespeare's most popular plays on the stage and has been adapted successfully for film. This new and innovative edition recognizes the play's pre-eminence as a performance work: a perspective that informs every aspect of the editing. Challenging traditional practice, the text is based on the 1597 Quarto which, brings us closest to the play as it would have been staged in Shakespeare's theater. The introduction, which is illustrated, explores the long performance history from Shakespeare's time to the present. The commentary gives detailed explanation of matters of...

King Lear, widely considered Shakespeare's most deeply moving, passionately expressed, and intellectually ambitious play, has almost always been edited from the revised version printed in the First Folio of 1623, with additions from the quarto of 1608. Now for the first time, this new volume presents the full, scholarly edition to be based firmly on the quarto, now recognized as the base text from which all others derive. A thorough, attractively written introduction suggests how the work grew slowly in Shakespeare's imagination, fed by years of reading, thinking, and experience as a...

Henry VI: Part One is a dramatic tale of the lives of soldiers, diplomats, kings, and insurrectionists. It depicts the fractious instability of the court and nobility of fifteenth-century England, and their squabbles with their French counterparts.
Despite its debut performance in 1592, however, Henry VI: Part One does not appear in printed form until some thirty years later, in the 1623 folio. There are many questions, therefore, surrounding exactly how many people wrote the play, when they did so, how it was performed, who played what part, and the nature of the...