From the Royal Shakespeare Company - a modern, definitive edition of Shakespeare's most loved comedy. With an expert introduction by Sir Jonathan Bate, this unique edition presents a historical overview of A Midsummer Night's Dream in performance, takes a detailed look at specific productions, and recommends film versions. Included in this edition are three interviews with leading directors Michael Boyd, Gregory Doran and Tim Supple, providing an illuminating insight into the extraordinary variety of interpretations that are possible. This edition also includes an essay on Shakespeare's career and Elizabethan theatre, and enables the reader to understand the play as it was originally intended - as living theatre to be enjoyed and performed. Ideal for students, theatre-goers, actors and general readers, the RSC Shakespeare editions offer a fresh, accessible and contemporary approach to reading and rediscovering Shakespeare's works for the twenty-first century.

This catalogue of the Shakespeare First Folio (1623) is the result of two decades of research during which 232 surviving copies of this immeasurably important book were located - a remarkable 72 more than were recorded in the previous census over a century ago - and examined in situ, creating an essential reference work.

From the Royal Shakespeare Company - a modern, definitive edition of Shakespeare's most loved comedy. With an expert introduction by Sir Jonathan Bate, this unique edition presents a historical overview of A Midsummer Night's Dream in performance, takes a detailed look at specific productions, and recommends film versions. Included in this edition are three interviews with leading directors Michael Boyd, Gregory Doran and Tim Supple, providing an illuminating insight into the extraordinary variety of interpretations that are possible. This edition also includes an essay on Shakespeare's career and Elizabethan theatre, and enables the reader to understand the play as it was originally intended - as living theatre to be enjoyed and performed. Ideal for students, theatre-goers, actors and general readers, the RSC Shakespeare editions offer a fresh, accessible and contemporary approach to reading and rediscovering Shakespeare's works for the twenty-first century.

From the Royal Shakespeare Company - a modern, definitive edition of Shakespeare's bittersweet comedy of courtship and ethnic tension. With an expert introduction by Sir Jonathan Bate, this unique edition presents a historical overview of The Merchant of Venice in performance, takes a detailed look at specific productions, and recommends film versions. Included in this edition are interviews with two leading directors and two actors - Darko Tresjnak, David Thacker, Anthony Sher and Henry Goodman - providing an illuminating insight into the extraordinary variety of interpretations that are possible. This edition also includes an essay on Shakespeare's career and Elizabethan theatre, and enables the reader to understand the play as it was originally intended - as living theatre to be enjoyed and performed. Ideal for students, theatre-goers, actors and general readers, the RSC Shakespeare editions offer a fresh, accessible and contemporary approach to reading and rediscovering Shakespeare's works for the twenty-first century.

From the Royal Shakespeare Company - a modern, definitive edition of Shakespeare's gripping political and personal tragedy. With an expert introduction by Sir Jonathan Bate, this unique edition presents a historical overview of Coriolanus in performance, takes a detailed look at specific productions, and recommends film versions. Included in this edition are interviews with two leading directors - Gregory Doran and David Farr - providing an illuminating insight into the extraordinary variety of interpretations that are possible. This edition also includes an essay on Shakespeare's career and Elizabethan theatre, and enables the reader to understand the play as it was originally intended - as living theatre to be enjoyed and performed. Ideal for students, theatre-goers, actors and general readers, the RSC Shakespeare editions offer a fresh, accessible and contemporary approach to reading and rediscovering Shakespeare's works for the twenty-first century.

From the Royal Shakespeare Company - a modern, definitive edition of Shakespeare's bleakest and most profound tragedy. With an expert introduction by Sir Jonathan Bate, this unique edition presents a historical overview of King Lear in performance, takes a detailed look at specific productions, and recommends film versions. Included in this edition are interviews with three leading directors - Adrian Noble, Deborah Warner and Trevor Nunn - providing an illuminating insight into the extraordinary variety of interpretations that are possible. This edition also includes an essay on Shakespeare's career and Elizabethan theatre, and enables the reader to understand the play as it was originally intended - as living theatre to be enjoyed and performed. Ideal for students, theatre-goers, actors and general readers, the RSC Shakespeare editions offer a fresh, accessible and contemporary approach to reading and rediscovering Shakespeare's works for the twenty-first century.

Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593), a man of extreme passions and a playwright of immense talent, is the most important of Shakespeare's contemporaries. This edition offers his five major plays, which show the radicalism and vitality of his writing in the few years before his violent death.

"The text of any Shakespeare play is a living negotiable entity: scholarship and theatre practice work together to keep the plays alive and vividly present." - Greg Doran, RSC Artistic Director Emeritus Developed in partnership with the Royal Shakespeare Company, this Complete Works of William Shakespeare combines exemplary textual scholarship with beautiful design. Curated by expert editors Sir Jonathan Bate and Professor Eric Rasmussen, the text in this collection is based on the iconic 1623 First Folio: the first and original Complete Works lovingly assembled by Shakespeare's fellow actors, and the version of Shakespeare's text preferred by many actors and directors today. This stunning revised edition goes further to present Shakespeare's plays as they were originally intended - as living theatre to be enjoyed and performed on stage. Along with new colour photographs from a vibrant range of RSC productions, a new Stage Notes feature documenting the staging choices in 100 RSC productions showcases the myriad ways in which Shakespeare's plays can be brought to life. Now featuring the entire range of Shakespeare's plays, poems and sonnets, this edition is expanded to include both The Passionate Pilgrim and A Lover's Complaint. Along with Bate's excellent general introduction and short essays, this collection includes a range of aids to the reader such as on-page notes explaining unfamiliar terms and key facts boxes providing plot summaries and additional helpful context. A Complete Works for the 21st century, this versatile and highly collectable edition will inspire students, theatre practitioners and lovers of Shakespeare everywhere.

In their lively and engaging edition of this sometimes neglected early play, Cox and Rasmussen make a strong claim for it as a remarkable work, revealing a confidence and sureness that very few earlier plays can rival. They show how the young Shakespeare, working closely from his chronicle sources, nevertheless freely shaped his complex material to make it both theatrically effective and poetically innovative. The resulting work creates, in Queen Margaret, one of Shakespeareas strongest female roles and is the source of the popular view of Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick as akingmakera. Focusing on the history of the play both in terms of both performance and criticism, the editors open it to a wide and challenging variety of interpretative and editorial paradigms.

From the Royal Shakespeare Company - a modern, definitive edition of Shakespeare's magical vision. With an expert introduction by Sir Jonathan Bate, this unique edition presents a historical overview of The Tempest in performance, takes a detailed look at specific productions, and recommends film versions. Included in this edition are three interviews with leading directors - Peter Brook, Sam Mendes and Rupert Goold - providing an illuminating insight into the extraordinary variety of interpretations that are possible. This edition also includes an essay on Shakespeare's career and Elizabethan theatre, and enables the reader to understand the play as it was originally intended - as living theatre to be enjoyed and performed. Ideal for students, theatre-goers, actors and general readers, the RSC Shakespeare editions offer a fresh, accessible and contemporary approach to reading and rediscovering Shakespeare's works for the twenty-first century.

From the Royal Shakespeare Company - a modern, definitive edition of Shakespeare's touching fable of loss and reunion. With an expert introduction by Sir Jonathan Bate, this unique edition presents a historical overview of Pericles in performance, takes a detailed look at specific productions, and recommends film versions. Included in this edition are interviews with three leading directors and an actor - Adrian Noble, Dominic Cooke, Adrian Jackson and Laura Rees - providing an illuminating insight into the extraordinary variety of interpretations that are possible. This edition also includes an essay on Shakespeare's career and Elizabethan theatre, and enables the reader to understand the play as it was originally intended - as living theatre to be enjoyed and performed. Ideal for students, theatre-goers, actors and general readers, the RSC Shakespeare editions offer a fresh, accessible and contemporary approach to reading and rediscovering Shakespeare's works for the twenty-first century.

From the Royal Shakespeare Company - a modern, definitive edition of Shakespeare's great comedy of love, folly and mistaken identity. With an expert introduction by Sir Jonathan Bate, this unique edition presents a historical overview of Twelfth Night in performance, takes a detailed look at specific productions, and recommends film versions. Included in this edition are interviews with three leading directors - Sam Mendes, Declan Donnellan and Neil Bartlett - providing an illuminating insight into the extraordinary variety of interpretations that are possible. This edition also includes an essay on Shakespeare's career and Elizabethan theatre, and enables the reader to understand the play as it was originally intended - as living theatre to be enjoyed and performed. Ideal for students, theatre-goers, actors and general readers, the RSC Shakespeare editions offer a fresh, accessible and contemporary approach to reading and rediscovering Shakespeare's works for the twenty-first century.

From the Royal Shakespeare Company - a modern, definitive edition of Shakespeare's journey into the Forest of Arden. With an expert introduction by Sir Jonathan Bate, this unique edition presents a historical overview of As You Like It in performance, takes a detailed look at specific productions, and recommends film versions. Included in this edition are interviews with important Shakespearean directors (Dominic Cooke and Michael Boyd) and a Shakespearean actor (Naomi Frederick) - providing an illuminating insight into the extraordinary variety of interpretations that are possible. This edition also includes an essay on Shakespeare's career and Elizabethan theatre, and enables the reader to understand the play as it was originally intended - as living theatre to be enjoyed and performed. Ideal for students, theatre-goers, actors and general readers, the RSC Shakespeare editions offer a fresh, accessible and contemporary approach to reading and rediscovering Shakespeare's works for the twenty-first century.

"O mother, mother! What have you done?"
--"Coriolanus"
Eminent Shakespearean scholars Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen provide a fresh new edition of this gripping political and personal tragedy--along with more than a hundred pages of exclusive features, including
- an original Introduction to "Coriolanus"
- incisive scene-by-scene synopsis and analysis with vital facts about the work
- commentary on past and current productions based on interviews with leading directors, actors, and designers
- photographs of key RSC productions
- an overview of Shakespeare's theatrical career and chronology of his plays
Ideal for students, theater professionals, and general readers, these modern and accessible editions from the Royal Shakespeare Company set a new standard in Shakespearean literature for the twenty-first century.

John Dover Wilson's New Shakespeare, published between 1921 and 1966, became the classic Cambridge edition of Shakespeare's plays and poems until the 1980s. The series, long since out-of-print, is now reissued. Each work is available both individually and as a set, and each contains a lengthy and lively introduction, main text, and substantial notes and glossary printed at the back. The edition, which began with The Tempest and ended with The Sonnets, put into practice the techniques and theories that had evolved under the 'New Bibliography'. Remarkably by today's standards, although it took the best part of half a century to produce, the New Shakespeare involved only a small band of editors besides Dover Wilson himself. As the volumes took shape, many of Dover Wilson's textual methods acquired general acceptance and became an established part of later editorial practice, for example in the Arden and New Cambridge Shakespeares.

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Enter Cassandra (Scene 2) ACT II Scene I. A Part of the Grecian Camp Enter Ajax and THersites Ajax. Thersites ! Thersites. Agamemnon ? how if he had boils ? full, all over, generally ? Ajax. Thersites l TROILUS ? 5 65 Thersites. And those boils did run ? say so, did not the general run then ? were not that a botchy core ? Ajax. Dog! Thersites. Then would come some matter from him; I see none now. Ajax. Thou bitch-wolf's son, canst thou not hear ? Bea ting him Feel, then, 11 Thersites. The plague of Greece upon thee, thou -"ongrel beef-witted lord ! -. rff- '.-'., . Ajax. Speak then, thou vinewed'st leaven, speak ! I will beat thee into handsomeness. Thersites. I shall sooner rail thee into wit and holiness; but I think thy horse will sooner con an oration than thou learn a prayer without book. Thou canst strike, canst thou? a redjrnurrain o' thy jade's tricks! 20 Ajax. Toadstool, learn me the proclamation. Thersites. Dost thou think I have no sense, thou strikest me thus ? Ajax. The proclamation! Thersites. Thou art proclaimed a fool, I think. Ajax. Do not, porpentine, do not! my fingers itch. Thersites. I would thou didst itch from head to foot and I had the scratching of thee; I would make thee the loathsomest scab in Greece. When thou art forth in the incursions, thou strikest as slow as another. 31 Ajax. I say, the proclamation ! Thersites. Thou grumblest and railest every hour on Achilles, and thou art as full of envy at his greatness as Cerberus is at Proserpina's beauty, ay, that thou barkest at him. Ajax. Mistress Thersites ! Thersites. Thou shouldst strike him., / J. /. /..t''.'" Ajax. cpbio' .r Thersites. He would pun thee into shivers with his fisi, as a sailor breaks a biscuit. 41 ...

In their lively and engaging edition of this sometimes neglected early play, Cox and Rasmussen make a strong claim for it as a remarkable work, revealing a confidence and sureness that very few earlier plays can rival. They show how the young Shakespeare, working closely from his chronicle sources, nevertheless freely shaped his complex material to make it both theatrically effective and poetically innovative. The resulting work creates, in Queen Margaret, one of ShakespeareAEs strongest female roles and is the source of the popular view of Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick as aekingmakerAE. Focusing on the history of the play both in terms of both performance and criticism, the editors open it to a wide and challenging variety of interpretative and editorial paradigms."

Everyman and Mankind are morality plays which mark the turn of the medieval period to the early modern, with their focus on the individual. Everyman follows a man's journey towards death and his efforts to secure himself a life thereafter, whilst Mankind shows a man battling with temptation and sin, often with great humour. Both texts are modernised here and edited to the highest standards of scholarship, with full on-page commentaries giving the depth of information and insight associated with all Arden editions. The comprehensive, illustrated introduction argues that the plays signal the birth of the early modern consciousness and puts them in their historic and religious contexts. An account is also given of the staging and performance history of the plays and their critical history and significance. With a wealth of helpful and incisive commentary this is the finest edition of the plays available.

This Norton Critical Edition of Antony and Cleopatra is based on the First Folio (1623), the only authoritative text of the play. The edition includes a preface, detailed explanatory annotations, two maps, and visuals ranging from a silver tetradrachm (34 B.C.E.) to an Egyptian Queen Barbie. Sources, Analogues, and Contexts, a rich selection of historical and literary writing, gives readers an understanding of Antony and Cleopatra s origins, from the earlier texts that inspired Shakespeare, especially those by Herodotus, Plutarch, and Virgil, to later works by Chaucer, Mary Sidney (Countess of Pembroke), and Samuel Daniel. The volume also includes a wide array of the early modern English views of Egyptians, gypsies, and women that informed Shakespeare s worldview and his writing. Criticism includes fourteen essays representing four centuries of interpretation, from the early observations of Samuel Johnson to the Romantic readings of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Hazlitt, from the razor-sharp analyses of Anna Brownell Jameson to recent essays by Jonathan Gil Harris, Patricia Parker, Anston Bosman, and Ania Loomba, among others. Adaptations, Rewritings, and Appropriations reprints alternative versions of Antony and Cleopatra s story, including one by John Dryden, a burlesque version by F. C. Burnand, a poem by Robert Louis Stevenson, and an Arabic version by Ahmad Shawqi. A Selected Bibliography is also included.

From the Royal Shakespeare Company - a definitive, fresh new look at Shakespeare's most compelling villain. With an expert introduction by Sir Jonathan Bate, this unique edition presents a historical overview of Richard III in performance, takes a detailed look at specific productions, and recommends film versions. Included in this edition are interviews with an actor, a director and a designer - Simon Russell Beale, Bill Alexander and Tom Piper - providing an illuminating insight into the extraordinary variety of interpretations that are possible. This edition also includes an essay on Shakespeare's career and Elizabethan theatre, and enables the reader to understand the play as it was originally intended - as living theatre to be enjoyed and performed. Ideal for students, theatre-goers, actors and general readers, the RSC Shakespeare editions offer a fresh, accessible and contemporary approach to reading and rediscovering Shakespeare's works for the twenty-first century.

Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593), a man of extreme passions and a playwright of immense talent, is the most important of Shakespeare's contemporaries. This edition offers his five major plays, which show the radicalism and vitality of his writing in the few years before his violent death.
Tamburlaine Part One and Part Two deal with the rise to world prominence of the great Scythian shepherd-robber; The Jew of Malta is a drama of villainy and revenge; Edward II was to influence Shakespeare's Richard II. Doctor Faustus, perhaps the first drama taken from the medieval legend of a man who sells his soul to the devil, is here in both its A- and its B- text, showing the enormous and fascinating differences between the two.
Under the General Editorship of Dr. Michael Cordner of the University of York, the texts of the plays have been newly edited and are presented with modernized spelling and punctuation. In addition, there is a scholarly introduction and detailed annotation.
About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

"It must be by his death."
--"Julius Caesar"
Eminent Shakespearean scholars Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen provide a fresh new edition of this masterpiece of political power play and manipulation--along with more than a hundred pages of exclusive features, including:
- an original Introduction to "Julius Caesar"
- incisive scene-by-scene synopsis and analysis with vital facts about the work
- commentary on past and current productions based on interviews with leading directors, actors, and designers
- photographs of key RSC productions
- an overview of Shakespeare's theatrical career and chronology of his plays
Ideal for students, theater professionals, and general readers, these modern and accessible editions from the Royal Shakespeare Company set a new standard in Shakespearean literature for the twenty-first century.

Dr. Faustus is one of the jewels of early modern English drama, and is still widely performed today. Interestingly, the play has come down to the contemporary audience in two distinct versions that have become known as the 'A' and the 'B' texts. David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen, who edited the original Revels edition over twenty years ago (and are two of the most eminent editors currently working), have hit upon the fascinating idea of presenting both texts on facing pages. This allows readers to compare the two 'versions', the 'A' text which is the one closest to Marlowe, and the longer 'B' text with additions by Samuel Rowley; in this unique edition, the reader is made aware of the changing tastes of audiences, the stage history of the play, and of just how intricate 'editing' a play can be. With a concise and illuminating introduction, and relevant notes and images, this Revels Student Edition of the 'A' and 'B' texts of Dr. Faustus will prove to be an enthralling document, and an excellent edition for student and theatre-goer alike. -- .

Among the plays staged at the Globe and published in Shakespeare's lifetime were The London Prodigal by William Shakespeare, A Yorkshire Tragedy written by W. Shakespeare and Thomas Lord Cromwell written by W. S. Could Shakespeare really have written these plays? Why were they excluded from the First Folio of his collected works?

Edited by renowned Shakespeare scholars Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen and published in coordination with the Royal Shakespeare Company, this is the first edition in over 100 years of the fascinatingly varied body of plays that has become known as "The Shakespeare Apocrypha." Among the highlights are the whole text of Sir Thomas More, which includes the only scene from any play to survive in Shakespeare's own handwriting; the history play Edward III, including a superb seduction scene by Shakespeare; and the domestic murder tragedy Arden of Faversham, in which Shakespeare's hand has been detected by recent computer-assisted analysis. This is also the first ever Shakespeare edition to include the 1602 edition of Thomas Kyd's pioneering The Spanish Tragedy, with "additions" that the latest research attributes to Shakespeare. Included is a comprehensive account of the authorship and attribution of each play.

Featuring introductions and background on each play, key fact boxes with information on sources and the distribution of parts, on-page notes explaining difficult or obsolete vocabulary, and interviews with directors and actors who have staged the plays, this work will be an essential addition to the library of any Shakespeare buff.