Richard Proudfoot – författare

This new Complete Works marks the completion of the Arden Shakespeare Third Series and includes all of Shakespeare’s plays, poems and sonnets, edited by leading international scholars. New to this edition are the 'apocryphal' plays, part-written by Shakespeare: Double Falsehood, Sir Thomas More and King Edward III. The anthology is unique in giving all three extant texts of Hamlet from Shakespeare's time: the first and second Quarto texts of 1603 and 1604-5, and the first Folio text of 1623.With a simple alphabetical arrangement the Complete Works are easy to navigate. The lengthy introductions and footnotes of the individual Third Series volumes have been removed to make way for a general introduction, short individual introductions to each text, a glossary and a bibliography instead, to ensure all works are accessible in one single volume. This handsome Complete Works is ideal for readers keen to explore Shakespeare's work and for anyone building their literary library.

This Malone Society edition of Barnabe Barnes’s The Devil’s Charter (1607) is intended to supplement the important edition, published in 1904, of the play by R.B. McKerrow, the great editor of the works of Thomas Nashe. The new edition is based on a fresh examination of the twenty-three known copies of the quarto, which exhibit marked differences in relation to stop-press correction. The Introduction considers the play’s printing history, its date and authorship, its performance, and later history. Particular attention is paid to the possibility that Robert Armin had a hand in several scenes in the play and to how Barnes’s play may have come to be acted before King James I. Barnes is shown to have been familiar with Shakespeare’s plays and, in particular, to have borrowed elements from Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, and All’s Well that Ends Well.

Based on three lectures given by Professor Richard Proudfoot in October 1999 to celebrate the 400th anniversary of The Globe, The Arden Shakespeare's centenary and Professor Proudfoot's retirement from King's College; this enjoyable volume aims to give a general and non-specialist audience some sense of what scholarship has achieved in three critical areas of Shakespeare studies at the end of the twentieth century. Freshly and engagingly written, this lively volume will appeal to all those with an interest in Shakespeare studies.