Series: The Oxford Shakespeare

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...

Written near the end of Shakespeare's most phenomenally creative period, Antony and Cleopatra is perhaps the most ambitious of all Shakespeare's designs. Its unmatched geographical and historical sweep, bold mingling of genres, and extraordinary variety of style, mood, and effect set it apart. Yet the degree and nature of its success remain surprisingly contentious, and performances of the play have...

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 One was his most reprinted play, and it remains enormously popular with theatre-goers and readers. Falstaff still towers among Shakespeare's...

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...

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 recognised as the...

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 recognises 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 Winter's Tale is Shakespeare's most perfectly realised 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...

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...

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 dramatise them. The presentation of the text has been re-thought in theatrical terms, and...