The Oxford Shakespeare – serie

This edition offers a fully modernized text of one of Shakespeare's most fascinating plays. Henry IV, Part 2 is the only play in the canon whose structure almost exactly mirrors that of its predecessor, and thereby affords unique perspectives on Shakespeares art and craft. Far from being the impoverished country cousin of an illustrious work, Part 2 introduces unforgettable new characters like Pistol and Shallow, and memorable minor players such as Doll Tearsheet and the reluctant Goucestershire recruits. Above all, it gives us more Falstaff. Although he is now politically distanced from Hal, he looms larger than ever as a mischievous figure who never ceases to fascinate with his unique blend of native wit, inventiveness, and corruption. Through a radical reconsideration of the play's text(s) and date, it is argued here for the first time that the character of Falstaff was called Oldcastle in Part 2 as well as in Part 1, and that it was the vetting of Part 2 for the 1596-7 Christmas performances at Court which led to the change of name in both plays. This edition moreover takes the view that the Folio-only passages in the play reflect the text of the original prompt-book.

Shakespeare's early history plays have come into new prominence following their triumphant revival by the RSC under the title of This England. This new edition of the precursor to Richard III offers a fresh interpretation of the relationship between the two earliest texts - The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York (octavo, 1595) and the First Folio Henry VI Part Three (1623) - arguing that the former is a memorially reported and original version of the play later revised for the Folio. The two therefore represent Shakespeare's early and revised conceptions of the play. Unlike all previous editions, the text here is based rigorously on the Folio, with a re-examination of the dates of composition, memorial reporting, and revision. The introduction provides a useful synopsis of the historical events dramatized by Shakespeare, and appendices present extracts from his two chronicle sources and a detailed analysis of his dramatization of particular passages. The play's stage history and critical interpretations are considered as cultural and artistic responses to its multiply-focused dramatic structure: they are thus integrated, instead of being treated in separated sections on characters and themes, critical fortunes, and stage performance. The commentary fully explains meanings of archaic words and phrases, identifies historical figures and events in relation to Shakespeare's sources, and illustrates characters and scenes by reference to a variety of modern stage performers and productions in England and the USA - the first edition of the play to do so.

Twelfth Night is one of the most popular of Shakespeare's plays in the modern theatre, and this edition places particular emphasis on its theatrical qualities throughout. The introduction analyses the many views of love in the play, and the juxtaposition of happiness and melancholy used to dramatize them. The presentation of the text has been re-thought in theatrical terms, and the exceptionally full an detailed commentary pays close attention to the often difficult language. The play's contrastig moods are emphasized by the use of music, which plays an important role in Twelfth Night; James Walker has re-edited the existing music from the original sources, and where none exist has composed settings compatible in style with the surviving originals, so that this edition offers material for all the music required in a performance, the only modern edition to do so. The edition will be invaluable to actors, directors, and students at all levels.

This edition of The Two Gentlemen of Verona offers a complete consideration of all aspects of the text. It interprets the play less as a contribution to a Renaissance literary debate between love and friendship (the traditional academic view) than as a dramatization of competing kinds of love - a theatrical counterpart to Shakespeare's Sonnets. It analyzes the lyrical language with which these kinds of love are expressed, and explores the tension between lyricism and the violence of some of the play's events, notably the concluding attempted rape scene. It also provides further evidence that The Two Gentlemen is Shakespeare's earliest surviving play, and proposes a new actor for whom the principal comic role of Lance may have been designed. This is the only edition to offer a setting of the song 'Who is Silvia?', prepared by Guy Woolfenden from an Elizabethan source, and is therefore the only edition on the market to provide a complete text for performance.

Titus Andronicus was the young Shakespeare's audacious, sporadically brilliant experiment in sensational tragedy. Its horrors are notorious, but its powerful poetry of grief is the work of a true tragic poet. Introducing this edition, E.M. Waith provides a fresh view of the play in its historical context as well as an original discussion of the famous 'Peacham' drawing - the only surviving contemporary Shakespeare illustration. An illustrated account of performances, notably Peter Brook's production with Oliver as Titus, leads to an assessment of the play's qualities in the light of its critical reception. The eighteenth-century version of the play's probable source is given in one of the appendices.

Troilus and Cressida is perhaps Shakespeare's most philosophical play, and its preoccupation with war, sex, and time has seemed peculiarly relevant since the First World War. Fine productions have demonstrated the play's theatrical power, and critics have explored and illuminated its ideas and its exceptionally complex language. Kenneth Muir, in his introduction, sets the play in its historical context, discusses its odd career in the theatre, examines Shakespeare's handling of his multiple sources, and assesses the contribution of interpretative criticism to a deeper understanding of this sombre examination of a fallen world.

Written near the end of Shakespeare's most phenomenally creative period, Antony and Cleopatra is perhaps the most ambitious of all Shakespeare's designs, in its unmatched geographical and historial sweep, its bold mingling of genres, and its extraordinary variety of style, mood, and effect. Yet the degree and nature of its success remain surprisingly contentious, and performances of the play have seldom matched the extravagant expectations of its admirers.The wideranging introduction to this new edition considers the paradoxes of the play's reception from a number of angles. A full discussion of Shakespeare's sources (the most important of which is excerpted in a generous appendix) considers ways in which these may have influenced the play's problematic design. A comprehensive stage history illustrates how the theatrical fortunes of Antony and Cleopatra continue to be affected by the inappropriate spectacular traditions of nineteenth-century staging, and by an enduring gender-inflected orientalism that has particularly distorted responses to the character of Cleopatra. A substantial critical section examines how the technique of the play - its deliberate frustrations of expectation, its carefully constructed tensions between rhetoric and action, and its daring exploitation of bathos and anti-climax - may have contributed to the sense of disappointment which colours so many accounts of performance. The editor argues that such effects are structural to the paradoxical vision of this tragedy and to its disturbed preoccupation with the unstable boundaries of gender and identity.The text has been freshly edited in accordance with the principles of the series, and the extensive commentary is attentive to the theatrical dimensions of the play as well as to the rich complexity of its poetic language.

Henry V, the climax of Shakespeare's sequence of English history plays, is an inspiring, often comic celebration of a young warrior-king. But it is also a study of the costly exhilarations of war, and of the penalties as well as the glories of human greatness. Introducing this brilliantly innovative edition, Gary Taylor shows how Shakespeare shaped his historical material, examines controversial critical interpretations, discusses the play's fluctuating fortunes in performance, and analyses the range and variety of Shakespeare's characterization. The first Folio text is radically rethought, making original use of the First Quarto (1600).

As Henry's throne is threatened by rebel forces, England is divided. The characters reflect these oppositions, with Hal and Hotspur vying for position, and Falstaff leading Hal away from his father and towards excess. During Shakespeare's lifetime Henry IV, Part I was his most reprinted play, and it remains enormously popular with theatregoers and readers. Falstaff still towers among Shakespeare's comic inventions as he did in the late 1590s. David Bevington's introduction discusses the play in both performance and criticism from Shakespeare's time to our own, illustrating the variety of interpretations of which the text is capable. He analyses the play's richly textured language in a detailed commentary on individual words and phrases and clearly explains its historical background.

Written at some time between 1602 and 1604, Othello belongs to the period in which Shakespeare's powers as a tragic dramatist were at their peak. On stage, the romantic cast of its story and the remorseless drive of its plotting, combined with operatic extravagance of its emotion and the swelling music of its poetry, have made it amongst the most consistently successful of his tragedies; and numerous anecdotes testify to its extraordinary capacity to overwhelm the imagination of an audience. In recent times the play's bold treatment of love and marriage across the divide of race has made it a work of particular interest to theatre directors and scholars alike. Yet Othello's critical fortunes have been uneven; for, since Rymer's notorious denunciation of this 'tragedy of [a] handkerchief,' at the end of the seventeenth century, its claim to rank amongst Shakespeare's greatest achievements has been challenged by critics who have found its plot too strained, its characters too improbable, and its tale of marital jealousy and murder too meanly domestic to challenge comparison with Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, or even that saga of tragic infatuation, Antony and Cleopatra.The extensive introduction to this new edition answers the play's detractors by stressing the public dimensions of the tragedy, paying particular attention to its treatment of colour and social relations. Although 'race' in the early modern period was still an embryonic category, Othello is explored as a text that-not least in its performance history-has played a formative role (for both good and ill) in the emergence of racial thinking, and that as a result remains deeply controversial. In the play's own time, however, the sensitivities aroused by the hero's colour might well have seemed less significant than the way in which Iago's perfidious role plays out a crisis in the institution of service on which the entire social order, including its treatment of gender, was founded. In this respect, too, Othello emerges as a work profoundly involved in the social and political processes that helped to shape the modern world.The text has been freshly edited in accordance with the general principles of the series. Othello has come down to us in two markedly different early texts; and the substantial differences between the 1622 Quarto and the 1623 Folio have led to its becoming involved, along with Hamlet and Lear, in an intense debate over Shakespearian revision. Michael Neill argues however, that, in the case of Othello, variation is much less likely to be the result of changed authorial intentions than of theatrical cutting and the peculiar circumstances of textual transmission. While the Folio is generally the more reliable of the rival versions, the Quarto's origin in a text that has been modified for performance text make it indispensable, and the two have been fully collated. This edition also makes full use of the Second Quarto (1632) a text which, although it is without independent authority, preserves important textual decisions made by an intelligent and well-informed editor nearly contemporary with the dramatist himself. Further appendices include a discussion of dating problems, an account of the music in the play, and a full translation of the Italian novella from which the story derives. The detailed commentary is designed to alert readers to the play's theatrical life, as well as helping them to explore its rich language and notoriously treacherous word-play.

Coriolanus is perhaps the most brillant political play ever written. Though it is set in Ancient Rome, it has proved itself over the centuries as a perennially relevant study of the relationship between personality and politics. The Introduction to this new edition considers Shakespeare's adaptation of his historical material in relation to the social and political conditions in London and Stratford at the time of the play's composition, also offering new evidence that it was written in 1608. The play's searching presentation of the tension between politics and psychology is shown to result from major reinterpretations of Plutarch's structure and characterization. The editor offers a thorough and subtle analysis of the verbal style of the text and of its staging in relation to the Blackfriars theatre, where it was probably the first of Shakespeare's plays to be presented and for which it may have been written. A detailed study of its theatrical history illuminates the wide range of meanings the play has had for subsequent ages. The thorough commentary pays special attention to the needs of the actors and directors.

This is the first full-scale edition of Cymbeline for thirty-seven years. During that time, there has been considerable interest in Shakespeare's late work in the theatre, and several notable productions have demonstrated the powerful impact of Cymbeline. Based firmly on Roger Warren's extensive experience of the play in rehearsal and performance, this edition shows how Shakespeare draws upon a wide range of sources to create a self-sufficient dramatic universe, combining virtuoso theatrical and poetic means to present a story of a marriage imperilled by mistrust and painfully rebuilt through the physical and spiritual journeys undertaken by the heroine and hero, set in a context of international conflict. A full and detailed commentary pays close attention to the play's complex, evocative language.

A Midsummer Night's Dream is perhaps the best-loved of Shakespeare's plays, and certainly the one that children are likely to encounter first; its mixture of aristocrats, workers, and fairies meeting in a wood outside Athens has a magic of its own. Simple and engaging on the surface, it is nonetheless a highly original and sophisticated work, remarkable for both its literary and its theatrical mastery. The fact that it is one of the very few of Shakespeare's plays not to draw on a narrative source suggests the degree to which it reflects his deepest imaginative concerns.In his Introduction, defining the play in both the literary and theatrical traditions to which it belongs, Peter Holland pays particular attention to dreams and dreamers, tracing the materials out of which Shakespeare constructs his world of night and shadows in the strange but enchanting amalgam he makes of them. Both here and in the detailed commentary he draws freely upon the play's extensive performance history to illustrate the wide range of interpretations of which it is capable.

The Merry Wives of Windsor was almost certainly required at short notice for a court occasion in 1597: Shakespeare threw into it all the creative energy that went into his Henry IV plays. Falstaff is here, with Pistol, Mistress Quickly, and Justice Shallow, in a spirited and warm-hearted `citizen comedy'. Boisterous action is combined with situational irony and rich characterization.In his introduction T. W. Craik discusses the play's probable occasion (the Garter Feast of 1597 at court), its relationship to Shakespeare's English history plays and to other sources, its textual history (with particular reference to the widely diverging 1623 Folio and 1602 Quarto), and its original quality as drama. He assesses various interpretations of the play, topical, critical, and theatrical. In the commentary he pays particular attention to expounding the literal sense (he proposes some new readings) and evoking the stage business.

This important new edition of one of Shakespeare's more neglected plays offers a wide-ranging critical introduction, concentrating on its relevance to Elizabethan political issues and on the role played in it by women, by legal concepts and practices, and by the family. The printing of the play in the First Folio (1623) is studied in fresh detail, and there are illustrations of the play in performance, and a comprehensive stage history. Full and helpful annotation pays special attention to the play's language and staging.

Pericles was one of the most popular plays in the Jacobean theatre, and it has regained much of that popularity in the modern theatre. 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: many passages are nonsensical, others appear to be missing altogether. Earlier editions have merely published a cleaned-up version of the Quarto, leaving crucial differences unaddressed; but this edition offers a conjectural reconstruction of what the original play might have been like. It is based on that published in the Oxford Complete Works of 1986, modified in the light of its use in several productions since then. It draws upon George Wilkin's narrative The Painful Adventures of Pericles (1608) to emend some of the Quarto's errors and to supply some of the missing material. It does so in the belief that the play is a collaboration between Shakespeare and Wilkins himself. The case for this is fully argued in the Introduction, which also explains the complex textual situation for the general reader. The entire Quarto text is reprinted in an appendix, together with the passages from Wilkin's narrative that have particularly contributed to the reconstruction, so that readers can see for themselves how the reconstruction has been made. It is hoped that this treatment of the play provides a much more comprehensive edition than has so far been available, making it more useful for actors, students, and the general reader.

Often under-rated as a mechanical farce, The Comedy of Errors, hilarious in its exploitation of mistaken identity, masterly in construction, and brilliant in linguistic invention, is the first of Shakespeare's romantic comedies, deeply moving in the reunions and reconciliations of its conclusion. This, the first major edition since 1988, bases itself directly on the 1623 Folio text and provides helpful explanatory notes. The Introduction, appreciative of the play's theatrical success over the centuries, argues that it was specifically written for and performed at the Gray's Inn Christmas revels on 28 December 1594, among the first composed by Shakespeare for his new company, the Lord Chamberlain's Men. Discussion of the play's origins argues that the immediate source for the frame plot (Egeon and his family) was not Gower's Confessio Amantis, is usually assumed, but a recent Elizabethan short novel, Lawrence Twine's Pattern of Painful Adventures. The main plot is unquestionably based on the Roman dramatist Plautus's Menaechmi, here reprinted in its entirety in a modernized version of William Warner's translation (1595).

This edition of one of Shakespeare's most popular and attractive plays adopts a radically new approach to the text. It offers modernized texts not only of the 1599 'good' quarto, but also of the short, or 'bad' quarto of 1597, regarding each as an independent witness to a 'mobile text' which changed in composition as Shakespeare wrote it and which has continued to evolve throughout its richly varied performance history, not only in the theatre but also in film, television, opera, and even ballet. The longer and more familiar text, first printed in 1599, is presented along with a detailed explanatory commentary sensitive to both literary and theatrical issues. The earlier, shorter text is annotated only where it differs significantly from the later. In addition to considering issues of performance, the Introduction traces the Romeo and Juliet narrative from its origins in myth through its adaptation in the novella, a form which changed the story in subtle ways as it crossed national boundaries from Italy to France to England. It shows how Shakespeare's transmutation of the story reflects contemporary concerns with love, death, adolescence, and patriarchism, and illuminates his artistic experimentations with poetry, style, rhetoric, and dramatic form.

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 response to matters topical in Jacobean London sharpens its thrust as satire. Yet the setting in ancient Athens allows it to read as a timeless fable, deeply relevant to a modern society that sees itself as pursuing material prosperity to the point of self-destruction. The first half of the play offers a satirical vision of a world of artifice and insincerity. The second half is a startlingly experimental drama in which a succession of Timon's real and false friends unsuccessfully challenge his commitment to his life as a misanthropic recluse in the woods.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 edition pays full justice to Middleton's presence, explaining how his contribution gave the play its distinctive edge. We as readers need to read this play as a dialogue between writers of different temperaments, and this edition is the first to make such a reading possible.The Introduction provides the fullest account of the play's performance history available. The commentary is the most detailed ever to have been published. Appendices include source materials and a listing of major productions world-wide.

Based on Chaucer's Knight's Tale the central themes of this humourous and moving play are the claims of love and friendship. The introduction to this new edition offers an illuminating account of Shakespeare's collaboration with his younger colleague John Fletcher, and there are full and helpful notes on unfamiliar words, stage business, allusions, and the play's often complex language.Eugene Waith is Douglas Tracy Smith Professor of English Literature Emeritus at Yale University, USA

The Winter's Tale is Shakespeare's most perfectly realized tragicomedy, as notable for its tragic intensity as for its comic grace and, throughout, for the richness and complexity of its poetry. It concludes, moreover, with the most daring and moving reconciliation scene in all Shakespeare's plays. Though the title may suggest an escapist fantasy, recent criticism has seen in the play a profoundly realistic psychology and a powerful commentary on the violence implicit in family relationships and deep, longlasting friendships. Stephen Orgel's edition considers the play in relation to Renaissance conceptions of both dramatic genre and the family, traced the changing critical and theatrical attitudes towards it, and places its psychological and dramatic conflicts within the Jacobean cultural and political context. The commentary pays special attention to the play's linguistic complexity, and the edition also includes a complete reprint of Shakespeare's source, Pandosto, by Robert Greene.

Shakespeare's Henry VI plays have come fully into their own in the modern theatre. They dramatize contemporary as much as Elizabethan issues: the struggle for power, the manoeuvres of politicians, social unrest, civil war - no wonder they have struck a chord with modern audiences. Roger Warren draws on his experience of Henry VI, Part Two in rehearsal as well as in performance to focus both the theatricality and the enduring contemporary relevance of the play, both in a wide-ranging Introduction and a detailed Commentary, which also provides a thorough explanation of the play's vivid language. The Textual Introduction offers a complete reconsideration of the complex relation between the two original texts.

This is the first fully annotated and comprehensive modern-spelling edition of King Henry VIII - known in its early performances as All is True - for over ten years. It makes full use of current scholarship on the dating, authorship, printing, and sources of the play, as well as critical interpretations, and includes an up-to-date survey of the play in performance. It is the first edition to make frequent use of Cavendish's life of Cardinal Wolsey, which seems likely to have influenced certain aspects of the play, as well as the other recognized sources in Holinshed, Hall, and Foxe. On authorship, the editor concludes that Shakespeare and his younger colleague John Fletcher worked on the script together but that Shakespeare was probably the guiding spirit, as well as the principal author of several major scenes. That they worked closely together is demonstrated through the consistency of style and overall dramatic structure and theme. The differences between them are by comparison minor and have more to do with spelling, punctuation, and versification than with conceptions of character or other more significant features of the play. The distinctions are thoroughly discussed in the General Introduction. A fully detailed commentary and a selective collation of major variant readings appear immediately beneath the text. Special attention has been given to the frequent allusion to scripture and proverb lore. An index to all words glossed and authorities cited appears at the end of the volume.

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, it is argued, brings us closest to the play as it would have been staged in Shakespeare's theatre. The introduction, which is illustrated, explores the long performance history from Shakespeare's time to the present. Its critical engagement with the play responds to recent historicist and gender-based approaches. The commentary gives detailed explication of matters of language, staging, text, and historical and cultural contexts, providing coverage that is both carefully balanced and alert to nuance of meaning. Documentation of the extensive textual variants is organized for maximum clarity: the readings of the Folio and the Quarto are presented in separate banks, and more specialist information is given at the back of the book. Appendices also include selected passages from the main source and a special index of actors and other theatrical personnel.

Here in handy paperback format are all Shakespeare's Histories, Comedies, and TragediesExcellent brief introductionsTexts established by the Oxford Shakespeare Complete Works, re-edited afresh from the original editions

Here in a handy paperback format are all Shakespeare's Comedies (there are companion volumes of the Histories and Tragedies), with excellent brief introduction, and the texts established by the Complete Oxford Shakespeare, which was re-edited afresh from the original editions. Critics acclaimed it as `the most ambitious edition of the works ever attempted' (Times Higher Education Supplement) and `the most interesting edition of Shakespeare since the First Folio ... here are the plays as they were acted by Shakespeare's company' (John Carey, Sunday Times).

Here in a handy paperback format are all Shakespeare's Tragedies (there are companion volumes of the Histories and Comedies), with excellent brief introduction, and the texts established by the Complete Oxford Shakespeare, which was re-edited afresh from the original editions. Critics acclaimed it as `the most ambitious edition of the works ever attempted' (Times Higher Education Supplement) and `the most interesting edition of Shakespeare since the First Folio ... here are the plays as they were acted by Shakespeare's company' (John Carey, Sunday Times).

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. Acting on recent discoveries, this volume presents the first 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 practical dramatist. Analysis of the great range of literary and other sources from which he shaped the tragedy, and of its critical and theatrical history, indicates that the play felt as shocking and original to early audiences as it does now. Its challenges have often been evaded, notably in Nahum Tate's notorious adaptation. During the twentieth century, however, deeper understanding of the conventions of Shakespeare's theatre restored confidence in the theatrical viability of his original text, while the play has also generated a remarkable range of offshoots in film, television, the visual arts, music, and literature. The commentary to this edition offers detailed help in understanding the language and dramaturgy in relation to the theatres in which King Lear was first performed. Additional sections reprint the early ballad, ignored by all modern editors, which was among its earliest derivatives, and provide additional guides to understanding and appreciating one of the greatest masterworks of Western civilization.

1 Henry VI was the Rose's great draw in the Spring of 1592, and is a dramatic tale of the lives of soldiers, diplomats, kings, and insurrectionists; 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, 1 Henry VI does not take a printed form until its appearance 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 what was the nature of the manuscript behind the first performance. In his wide-ranging introduction, Michael Taylor offers answers to these questions, and discusses other key issues such as language, structure, performance history, and the role of women in the play.