Series: The Arden Shakespeare Third Series

This Arden edition of Hamlet, arguably Shakespeare's greatest tragedy, presents an authoritative, modernised text based on the Second Quarto text with a new introductory essay covering key productions and criticism in the decade since its first publication. A timely update in the 400th anniversary year of Shakespeare's death, which will ensure the Arden edition continues to offer students a comprehensive...

In this edition, R.A. Foakes brings to bear a number of historical perspectives and critically addresses recent explorations of King Lear as a play of redemption, a play of despair, and a play that destabilises all commentary. Included is a composite text of Quarto and Folio versions, which allows readers to make their own editorial judgements.

This second edition of Othello features an illustrated introduction by leading American scholar Ayanna Thompson. This introduction addresses key issues such as race, religion, and gender, as well as exploring ways in which the play has been adapted in more recent times. Othello is one of Shakespeare’s great tragedies, written during the same five-year period as Hamlet, King Lear, and...

"A splendid edition: it incorporates the most recent modern scholarship ... and it does so within a compass and format that is both readable and usable." - Around the Globe Macbeth is one of Shakespeare's most performed and studied tragedies. This Arden Shakespeare Third Series edition offers students detailed on-page commentary notes, highlighting meaning, theatrical ideas, and themes. It also...

Critically acclaimed as one of Shakespeare's most complex and intriguing plays, Twelfth Night is a classic romantic comedy of mistaken identities. In recent years, it has returned to the centre of critical debate surrounding gender and sexuality. The introduction explores the multiple factors that make up the play's rich textual, theatrical, critical, and cultural history. Keir Elam surveys the play's...

The Tempest is one of Shakespeare's most popular plays, both in the classroom and in the theatre, and this revision brings the Arden 3 edition right up-to-date. A completely new section of the introduction discusses new thinking about Shakespeare's sources for the play and examines his treatment of colonial themes. It also covers key productions since this edition was first...

The Merchant of Venice is perhaps most associated not with its titular hero, Antonio, but with the complex figure of the money lender, Shylock. The play was described as a comedy in the First Folio, but modern audiences find it more problematic to categorise. The vilification of Shylock 'the Jew' can be very uncomfortable for a post-Holocaust audience, and debates...

David Scott Kastan lucidly explores the remarkable richness and the ambitious design of King Henry IV Part 1 and shows how these complicate any easy sense of what kind of play it is. Conventionally regarded as a history play, much of it is in fact conspicuously invented fiction, and Kastan argues that the non-historical, comic plot does not simply parody...

This Roman play is one of Shakespeare's last tragedies, best known for its political and military themes. Its hero, Coriolanus, is a proud General who does not hesitate to show his arrogant and outspoken contempt of the Roman rabble. The Tribunes banish him, and he raises an army to take his revenge on Rome. He finally concedes to the pleas...

Much Ado About Nothing presents a battle of the sexes in more ways than one: as both a lightning-fast skirmish of wits between two famously disputatious lovers, and a near-deadly conflict built on conventions of gender and male rivalry. Claire McEachern's new introduction brings this best-seller right up to date, analysing recent developments in criticism and the latest productions of...

The Arden Shakespeare is the established edition of Shakespeare's work. Justly celebrated for its authoritative scholarship and invaluable commentary, Arden editions guide you to a richer understanding and appreciation of Shakespeare's plays. This edition of A Midsummer Night's Dream provides a clear and authoritative text, detailed notes and commentary on the same page as the text, and a full introduction...

The editor takes a broad look at the different meanings which have been attributed to King Henry V, through a discussion of its various critical and theatrical interpretations. Craik discusses the choices made in presenting an edited text, and enables readers to think about what their own decisions might be. Source material is accessibly presented with the text in the...

Often described as one of Shakespeare’s ‘problem plays’, Measure for Measure explores issues of mercy and justice in corrupt Vienna. The Duke makes his strict moralistic deputy, Angelo, temporary leader of Vienna, while he disguises himself as a friar to witness all that ensues. In the comprehensive introduction to this new, fully-illustrated Arden edition, with commentary and notes from A....

This major new edition of Shakespeare's greatest tragedy of love argues that the play is ultimately Juliet's. The play text is expertly edited, and the on-page commentary notes discuss issues of staging, theme, meaning, and Shakespeare's use of his sources to give the reader deep and engaging insights into the play. The richly illustrated introduction looks at the play's exceptionally...

This edition of Julius Caesar provides a lively presentation of one of Shakespeare's most familiar and studied plays. The introduction sets the play in the context of the last years of Elizabeth I's reign, with rebellion stirring and conflicts over the calendar. It also explains the conscious use of classical rhetoric in the language of Caesar himself, contrasting with the...

This edition has a very helpful introduction and good clear text, as well as the exceptionally excellent and detailed notes.Dr Michael Herbert, St Andrews University A useful treatment of a complex playBarry Gaines, University of New Mexico, Shakespeare Quarterly John Wilders - literary advisor to the BBC TV Shakespeare series - brings thorough scholarship and a practical understanding of performance...

With its explorations of sexual ambivalence, As You Like It speaks directly to the twenty-first century. Juliet Dusinberre demonstrates that Rosalind's authority in the play grows from new ideas about women and reveals that Shakespeare's heroine reinvents herself for every age. But the play is also deeply rooted in Elizabethan culture, and through it, Shakespeare addresses some of the hotly...

In their 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...

The Taming of the Shrew is unique among Shakespeare's plays and is a perennial and compelling success in the theatre. Its reception is marked, however, by ongoing polarised debate over the meaning and worth of the play. This edition disengages Shakespeare's exuberant and disturbing marital farce from the tangled history of its reception. It views the two sixteenth-century Shrew plays...

Timon of Athens has struck many readers as rough and unpolished, perhaps even unfinished, though to others it has appeared as Shakespeare's most profound tragic allegory. Described by Coleridge as "the stillborn twin of King Lear", the play has nevertheless proved brilliantly effective in performance over the past thirty or forty years. This edition accepts and contributes to the growing...

In Cymbeline, Ancient Britain’s female heir to the throne is slandered by a decadent Italian while the Romans invade Britain to retain it as part of their empire. Shakespeare’s late romance is full of unpredictable conjunctions that are explored in the comprehensive introduction to this new, fully-illustrated Arden edition. Valerie Wayne takes a transformative look at the play’s critical and...

This volume gives readers the First Quarto text of 1603 and the Folio Text of 1623, modernised and edited to the usual Arden standard. As a companion to the Second Quarto volume, it will be of particular interest to scholars and students of textual history, or to anyone studying Hamlet at an advanced level. Both plays are edited and annotated,...

More troubled and troubling than King Henry IV Part 1, the play continues the story of King Henry’s decline and Hal’s reform. Though Part 2 echoes the structure of the earlier play, it is a darker and more unsettling world, in which even Falstaff’s revelry is more tired and cynical, and the once-merry Hal sloughs off his tavern companions to...

King Henry VIII has one of the fullest theatrical histories of any play in the Shakespeare canon, yet has been consistently misrepresented, both in performance and in criticism. This edition offers a fresh perspective on this ironic, multi-layered, collaborative play, revealing it as a complex meditation on the progress of Reformation which sees English life since Henry VIII's day as...

This edition celebrates King Henry VI Part 2 as one of the most exciting and dynamic plays of the English renaissance theatre, with its exploration of power politics and social revolution and its focus on the relationship between divine justice and sin. An extensive discussion of performance history traces the play's progress on stage from abridgement and adaptation to full...

This annotated edition of King Richard II takes a fresh look at the first part of Shakespeare's second tetralogy of history plays, showing how it relates to the other plays in the sequence. Forker places the play in its political context, discussing its relation to competing theories of monarchy, looking at how it faced censorship because of possible comparisons between...

Richard III is one of the great Shakespearean characters and roles. James R Siemon examines the attraction of this villain to audiences and focuses on how beguiling, even funny, he can be, especially in the earlier parts of the play. Siemon also places King Richard III in its historical context; as Elizabeth I had no heirs, the issue of succession...

With the publication of Woudhuysen's Arden 3 edition, the magisterial study of the play that will energise a new generation of readers and directors has now arrived. Love's Labour's Lost Eric Rasmussen, University of Nevada at Reno, Shakespeare Survey

In 1593, Shakespeare awoke and found himself famous. Lines from his comic, erotic, tragic poem Venus and Adonis were on everyone's lips. The appearance in 1594 of the darkly reflective and richly descriptive Rape of Lucrece confirmed his fame as "Sweet Master Shakespeare," Elizabethan England's most brilliant non-dramatic poet. Shorter poems in this volume testify further to Shakespeare's versatility and...

Shakespeare’s dextrous comedy of two twin masters and two twin servants continually mistaken for one another is both farce and more than farce. The Comedy of Errors examines the interplay between personal and commercial relationships, and the breakdown of social order that follows the disruption of identity. As well as detailed on-page commentary notes, this new edition has a long,...

"A significant and substantive edition, in that nothing has been taken for granted, everything has been opened to reconsideration. The commentary is exceptionally detailed and attentive to questions of language and meaning." -Shakespeare Quarterly The Merry Wives of Windsor, Shakespeare's only thoroughly English comedy, created an archetypal literary figure in the shape of the devious, irrepressible John Falstaff. This stimulating...

In All’s Well That Ends Well, Helen, a lowly ward, risks her life to satisfy her boundless love for Bertram, a count and ward to the King of France. Following him to Paris, she concocts an endangering plan to win the King of France’s favour and induce Bertram’s hand in marriage. In the comprehensive introduction to this new, fully-illustrated Arden...

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...

King Edward III is increasingly thought to have been written in significant part by Shakespeare. This landmark new edition by textual expert and General Editor of the Arden Shakespeare, Richard Proudfoot, offers a full account of the play's text and the evidence of Shakespeare's hand at work in it. Fully annotated with on-page notes and a lengthy critical introduction which...

A fresh look at a play usually regarded as the first component of a three-part historical epic, this edition argues that Henry VI Part 1 is a "prequel," a freestanding piece that returns for ironic and dramatic effect to a story already familiar to its audience. The play's ingenious use of stage space is closely analysed, as is its manipulation...

This tragi-comedy is one of the plays we know Shakespeare worked with a collaborator on—John Fletcher—and is based on Chaucer's Knight's Tale. This revised edition includes a new introductory essay bringing the edition up-to-date in terms of both the play's performance and critical history, and in particular with current thinking about the nature of Shakespeare's collaboration with other playwrights. As...

One of Shakespeare's later plays, best described as a tragi-comedy, The Winter's Tale falls into two distinct parts. In the first, Leontes is thrown into a jealous rage by his suspicions of his wife, Hermione, and his best friend. He imprisons her and orders that her new born daughter be left to perish. The second half is a pastoral comedy,...

Suzanne Gossett offers a full and critical performance history, with an introduction showing how the play's performance history has paralleled the criticism. It then gives an interpretation of this two-generation romance, with its successive male and female central characters, based on a reading 'through the family', and influenced by the feminist and new historicist criticism of the last two decades....

Shakespeare's Sonnets are universally loved and much-quoted throughout the world, while debates still rage as to the identity of the Dark Lady and how autobiographical the sonnets really are. The only edition of the sonnets published in Shakespeare's lifetime was published in 1609, and this revised edition is published to mark their 400th anniversary. First published in 1997 to much...

Two Gentlemen of Verona is commonly agreed to be Shakespeare's first comedy, and probably his first play. A comedy built around the confusions of doubling, cross-dressing, and identity, it is also a play about the ideal of male friendship and what happens to those friendships when men fall in love. William Carroll's engaging introduction focuses on the traditions and sources...

A revised edition of this intriguing and complex play, updated to cover recent critical thinking and stage history. Troilus and Cressida is a tragedy often labelled a "problem" play because of its apparent blend of genres and its difficult themes. Set in the Trojan Wars, it tells a story of doomed love and honour, offering a debased view of human...

The Arden Shakespeare is the established scholarly edition of Shakespeare’s plays. Now in its third series, Arden offers the best in contemporary scholarship. Each volume guides you to a deeper understanding and appreciation of Shakespeare’s plays. This edition of King John provides: A clear and authoritative text, edited to the highest standards of scholarship. Detailed notes and commentary on the...

This edition of Sir Thomas More is the first to bring the play into the context of a major Shakespeare series, to provide a substantial critical analysis, and to offer a comprehensive modern stage history. The introduction deals with issues such as the strange involvement of the anti-Catholic spy-hunter Anthony Munday as chief dramatist, the place of Sir Thomas More...

On December 1727, an intriguing play called Double Falshood; Or, The Distrest Lovers was presented for production by Lewis Theobald, who had it published in January 1728 after a successful run at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, London. The title page of the published version claims that the play was 'Written Originally by W. SHAKESPEARE'. Double Falsehood's plot is a...

Titus Andronicus is one of Shakespeare's earliest and bloodiest tragedies and was hugely successful in his lifetime. Subsequent generations have struggled with its bold confrontation of violence, but in the 20th and 21st centuries, the play has resonated with audiences again, perhaps because of its simultaneously shocking and playful approach to violent revenge and bodily mutilation. Jonathan Bate's original Arden...