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Usually classifed as a 'problem comedy', All's Well that Ends Well invites a fresh assessment. Its psychologically disturbing presentation of an agressive, designing woman and a reluctant husband wooed by trickery won it little favour in earlier centuries, and both directors and critics have frequently tried to avoid or simplify its uncomfortable elements. More recently, several distinguished productions have revealed it as an exceptionally penetrating study of both personal and social issues. In her introduction Susan Snyder makes the play's clashing ideologies of class and gender newly accessible. She explains how the very discords of style can be seen as a source of theatrical power and complexity, and offers a fully reconsidered, helpfully annotated text for both readers and actors.

Coriolanus is perhaps the most brilliant political play ever written. Set in Ancient Rome, it remains a gripping psychological study of the relationship between personality and politics. The introduction to this new edition considers Shakespeare's adaptation of his historical material (Plutarch's Lives ) 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. Professor Parker examines the play's history and particularly its staging at 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 thorough commentary pays special attention to the needs of actors and directors. This book is intended for students at A-level up to postgraduate of English literature, Shakespeare, Elizabethan drama, drama and politics; playgoers, actors, directors.

Julius Caesar's exciting plot, brilliant rhetoric, and searching characterisation have made it one of Shakespeare's most popular plays with both readers and theatre-goers. Introducing this thoroughly reconsidered edition, Arthur Humphreys provides a fresh look at the play's date and its place in the Shakespeare canon and examines Shakespeare's transmutation of history into drama. He investigates the play's ethical and moral concerns in a section on Roman values and analyses its fortunes in performance, from its immediately successful first staging to modern productions for cinema, television, and stage.

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, the family, and the law. There is a comprehensive stage history, and full and helpful annotation pays special attention to the play's language and staging.

The introduction to this, one of Shakespeare's ironic and boisterous texts, pays particular attention to expounding the literal sense (he proposes some new readings) and evoking the stage business. Falstaff is here, with Pistol, Mistress Quickly, and Justice Shallow, in a warm-hearted comedy.

Audiences have always delighted in the robust comedy and verbal inventiveness of The Taming of the Shrew. It has survived many adaptations ranging from, probably, the play printed in 1594 as The Taming of the Shrew through several eighteenth-century versions to modern-dress productions and transformations into ballet, musical, film, and opera. Introducing this new edition, H.J. Oliver pays attention to the play's theatrical virtues while also providing a deeply considered study of its textual problems, structural complexities, and interpretive challenges.

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 World War I. 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. This book is intended for students from A-level to postgraduate of English literature, Shakespeare, Elizabethan drama; actors, directors, playgoers.

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.

The Winter's Tale is Shakespeare's most perfectly realized tragi- comedy, 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 realist 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, traces 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.

Love's Labour's Lost, now recognized as one of the most delightful and stageworthy of Shakespeare's comedies, came into its own both on the stage and in critical esteem only during the 1930s and 1940s, after three hundred years of neglect by the theatre and undervaluation and misuse by critics. The Introduction to this new edition pays particular attention to this process of rehabilitation. The text, based on the quarto of 1598 and taking full account of the extensive scholarly study that text has received over recent years, rests on the hypothesis that the quarto goes back, probably by way of 'lost' quarto, to an authorial manuscript representing the play in a state prior to 'fair copy'. If this is so, the quarto takes on a special significance because through it we can watch Shakespeare in the act of composition, improvising, changing his mind, and revising as his play develops under his hand. The editor offers a number of new readings of difficult and disputed passages, together with some suggestions about the way in which the play's notorious 'tangles' may have come about. A detailed commentary offers full and helpful guidance to the play's scintillating language.

"Now is the winter of our discontent," intones Richard, Duke of Gloucester at the beginning of Shakespeare's Richard III, one of his most abidingly popular plays, and one of the most chilling portrayals of political tyranny ever seen on stage. Richar d emerges from the chaos which surrounds the reign of Henry VI, already dramatised by Shakespeare earlier in his career, determined to become king by removing his elder brother Edward IV by convincing him that their brother Clarence is plotting again st the crown. The deaths of both Clarence and Edward take Richard inexorably towards the crown, and the series of murders and conspiracies that Richard masterminds confirms his claim that "I am determined to prove a villain". Richard's political and sexual charisma are truly chilling, and his seduction of Lady Anne, over her husband's corpse is one of the most disturbing scenes in Shakespeare. At another level, the play is also a strongly anti-Yorkist play, which has a vested interest in portray ing Richard as such as vicious tyrant before seeing him toppled, ushering in a period of rule which prefigured the Tudor dynasty of which Elizabeth I was herself a part. The play has had a deep and lasting influence on audiences and writers; Brecht r ewrote the play as The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, while both Laurance Olivier and Ian Mckellen have produced memorable film versions of Richard III, the latter updating the play into a 1930s fascist state ruled over by a Richard akin to Oswald Mos ley. --Jerry Brotton--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Believed to be Shakespeare's very last play, Henry VIII is probably best remembered as the play which, when performed in June 1613, led to the Globe Theatre burning down due to the fireworks and cannon fire listed in the stage directions. However, ot herwise the play has puzzled critics, who can see little more in it than a nostalgic account of Henry's reign, and the prophetic birth and christening of Elizabeth, Shakespeare's Queen, which takes place at the end of the play.Henry VIII deals with t he intrigue which surrounds Henry's court, and in particular the controversial figure of Cardinal Wolsey, and Henry's separation from his wife Katherine, and infatuation with Anne Bullen. However, there is little sense of the psychological complexity created by Shakespeare in earlier history plays like Henry V. Henry VIII himself is a grand but distant figure, and the virulent anti-Catholicism lacks complexity. Within an increasingly troubled political period, the final hopeful invocation of "Pe ace, plenty, love, truth" seems rather flat, as does the play as a whole. This has led many critics to argue that Shakespeare was just one of many collaborators in the writing of the play. --Jerry Brotton--This text refers to an out of print or unava ilable edition of this title.

The new Oxford edition of Shakespeare's complete works reconsiders every detail of their text and presentation in the light of modern scholarship. The nature and authority of the early documents are re-examined, and the canon and chronological order of composition freshly established. Spelling and punctuation are modernized, and there is a brief introduction to each work, as well as an illuminating and informative General Introduction. OUP and Shakespeare's Globe Theatre this year embark on an official partnership to celebrate the plays both in print and performance - this reissued and rejacketed edition of the complete works underscores the commitment.

Hamlet's combination of violence and introspection is unusual among Shakespeare's tragedies. It is also full of curious riddles and fascinating paradoxes, making it one of his most widely discussed plays. Professor Hibbard's illuminating and original introduction explains the process by which variant texts were fused in the eighteenth century to create the most commonly used text of today. Drawing on both critical and theatrical history, he shows how this gusion makes Hamlet seem a much more 'problematic' play than it was when it originally appeared in the First Folio of 1623. The Oxford Shakespeare edition presents a radically new text, based on that First Folio, which printed Shakespeare's own revision of an earlier version. The result is a 'theatrical' and highly practical edition for students and actors alike.

A Midsummer Night's Dream is perhaps the best loved of Shakepeare's plays. It brings together aristocrats, workers, and fairies in a wood outside Athens, and from there the enchantment begins. Simple and engaging on the surface, it is none the less a highly original and sophisticated work, remarkable for both its literary and its theatrical mastery. It is one of the very few of Shakespeare's plays which do not draw on narrative sources, which suggests that it reflects his deepest imaginative concerns to an unusual degree. In his introduction Peter Holland pays particular attention to dreams and dreamers, and to Shakespeare's construction of a world of night and shadows. Both here and in his commentary he explores the play's extensive performance history to illustrate the wide range of interpretations of which it is capable.