Table of Contents
Praise
Title Page
Copyright Page
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Acknowledgements
Introduction
A USER’S GUIDE TO THE COMPLETE WORKS
THE LANGUAGE OF SHAKESPEARE
CONTEMPORARY ALLUSIONS TO SHAKESPEARE
COMMENDATORY POEMS AND PREFACES (1599-1640)
THE COMPLETE WORKS
THE TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
THE TAMING OF THE SHREW
The Taming of the Shrew
THE FIRST PART OF THE CONTENTION - (2 HENRY VI)
The First Part of the Contention of the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster
RICHARD DUKE OF YORK - (3 HENRY VI)
The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York and the Good King Henry the Sixth
HENRY VI PART ONE
The First Part of Henry the Sixth
TITUS ANDRONICUS
The Most Lamentable Roman Tragedy of Titus Andronicus
RICHARD III
The Tragedy of King Richard the Third
VENUS AND ADONIS
Venus and Adonis
THE RAPE OF LUCRECE
The Rape of Lucrece
EDWARD III
The Reign of King Edward the Third
THE COMEDY OF ERRORS
The Comedy of Errors
LOVE’S LABOUR’S LOST
Love’s Labour’s Lost
LOVE’S LABOUR’S WON - A BRIEF ACCOUNT
RICHARD II
The Tragedy of King Richard the Second
ROMEO AND JULIET
The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet
A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
KING JOHN
The Life and Death of King John
THE MERCHANT OF VENICE
The Comical History of the Merchant of Venice, or Otherwise Called the Jew of Venice
1 HENRY IV
The History of Henry the Fourth
THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR
The Merry Wives of Windsor
2 HENRY IV
The Second Part of Henry the Fourth
MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING
Much Ado About Nothing
HENRY V
The Life of Henry the Fifth
JULIUS CAESAR
The Tragedy of Julius Caesar
AS YOU LIKE IT
As You Like It
HAMLET
The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
TWELFTH NIGHT
Twelfth Night, or What You Will
TROILUS AND CRESSIDA
Troilus and Cressida
SONNETS AND ‘A LOVER’S COMPLAINT’
Sonnets
A Lover’s Complaint
VARIOUS POEMS
Various Poems
SIR THOMAS MORE
NOTE ON SPECIAL FEATURES OF PRESENTATION
The Book of Sir Thomas More
MEASURE FOR MEASURE
Measure for Measure
OTHELLO
The Tragedy of Othello the Moor of Venice
THE HISTORY OF KING LEAR - THE QUARTO TEXT
The History of King Lear
TIMON OF ATHENS
The Life of Timon of Athens
MACBETH
The Tragedy of Macbeth
ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA
The Tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra
ALL’S WELL THAT ENDS WELL
All’s Well That Ends Well
PERICLES
A Reconstructed Text of Pericles, Prince of Tyre
CORIOLANUS
The Tragedy of Coriolanus
THE WINTER’S TALE
The Winter’s Tale
THE TRAGEDY OF KING LEAR - THE FOLIO TEXT
The Tragedy of King Lear
CYMBELINE
Cymbeline, King of Britain
THE TEMPEST
The Tempest
CARDENIO - A BRIEF ACCOUNT
ALL IS TRUE - (HENRY VIII)
All Is True
THE TWO NOBLE KINSMEN
The Two Noble Kinsmen
FURTHER READING
A SELECT GLOSSARY
INDEX OF FIRST LINES OF SONNETS
Martin Droeshout’s engraving of Shakespeare, first published on the title-page of the First Folio (1623)
To the Reader
This figure that thou here seest put,
It was for gentle Shakespeare cut,
Wherein the graver had a strife
With nature to outdo the life.
O, could he but have drawn his wit
As well in brass as he hath hit
His face, the print would then surpass
All that was ever writ in brass!
But since he cannot, reader, look
Not on his picture, but his book.
BEN JOHNSON
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WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
THE COMPLETE WORKS
with a General Introduction, and Introductions to individual works, by
STANLEY WELLS
The Complete Works has been edited collaboratively under the General Editorship of Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor. Each editor has undertaken prime responsibility for certain works, as follows:
STANLEY WELLS The Two Gentlemen of Verona; The Taming of the Shrew; Titus Andronicus; Venus and Adonis; The Rape of Lucrece; Love’s Labour’s Lost; Much Ado About Nothing; As You Like It; Twelfth Night; The Sonnets and ‘A Lover’s Complaint’; Various Poems (printed); Othello; Macbeth; Antony and Cleopatra; The Winter’s Tale
GARY TAYLOR I Henry VI; Richard III; The Comedy of Errors; A Midsummer Night’s Dream; Henry V; Hamlet; Troilus and Cressida; Various Poems (manuscript); All’s Well That Ends Well; King Lear; Pericles; Cymbeline
JOHN JOWETT Richard II; Romeo and Juliet; King John; I Henry IV; The Merry Wives of Windsor; 2 Henry IV; Julius Caesar; Sir Thomas More; Measure for Measure; Timon of Athens; Coriolanus; The Tempest
WILLIAM MONTGOMERY The First Part of the Contention; Richard Duke of York; Edward III; The Merchant of Venice; All Is True; The Two Noble Kinsmen
American Advisory Editor · S. Schoenbaum
Textual Adviser · G. R. Proudfoot
Music Adviser · F. W. Sternfeld
Editorial Assistant · Christine Avern-Carr
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
THE preparation of a volume such as this would be impossible without the generosity that scholars can count on receiving from their colleagues, at home and overseas. Among those to whom we are particularly grateful are: R. E. Alton; John P. Andrews; Peter Beal; Thomas L. Berger; David Bevington; J. W. Binns; Peter W. M. Blayney; Fredson Bowers; A. W. Braunmuller; Alan Brissenden; Susan Brock; J. P. Brockbank; Robert Burchfield; Lou Burnard; Lesley Burnett; John Carey; Janet Clare; Thomas Clayton; T. W. Craik; Norman Davis; Alan Dessen; E. E. Duncan-Jones; K. Duncan-Jones; R. D. Eagleson; Philip Edwards; G. Blakemore Evans; Jean Fuzier; Hans Walter Gabler; Philip Gaskell; A. J. Gurr; Antony Hammond; Richard Hardin; G. R. Hibbard; Myra Hinman; R. V. Holdsworth; E. A. J. Honigmann; T. H. Howard-Hill; MacD. P. Jackson; Harold Jenkins; Charles Johnston; John Kerrigan; Randall McLeod; Nancy Maguire; Giorgio Melchiori; Peter Milward; Kenneth Muir; Stephen Orgel; Kenneth Palmer; John Pitcher; Eleanor Prosser; S. W. Reid; Marvin Spevack; R. K. Turner; E. M. Waith; Michael Warren; R. J. C. Watt; Paul Werstine; G. Walton Williams; Laetitia Yeandle.
We are conscious also of a great debt to the past: to our predecessors R. B. McKerrow and Alice Walker, who did not live to complete an Oxford Shakespeare but whose papers have been of invaluable assistance, and to the long line of editors and other scholars, from Nicholas Rowe onwards, whose work is acknowledged in William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion.
We gratefully acknowledge assistance from the staff of the following libraries and institutions: the Beinecke Library, Yale University; the Birmingham Shakespeare Library; the Bodleian Library, Oxford; the British Library; the English Faculty Library, Oxford; the Folger Shakespeare Library; Lambeth Palace Library; St. John’s College, Cambridge; the Shakespeare Centre, Stratford-upon-Avon; the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham; Trinity College, Cambridge; the Victoria and Albert Museum; Westminster Abbey Library.
Many debts of gratitude have also been incurred to persons employed in a variety of capacities by Oxford University Press. Among those with whom we have worked especially closely are Linda Agerbak, Sue Dommett, Oonagh Ferrier, Paul Luna, Jamie Mackay, Louise Pengelley, Graham Roberts, Maria Tsoutsos, and Patricia Wilkie. John Bell started it all, Kim Scott Walwyn made sure we finished it, and from beginning to end Christine Avern-Carr’s meticulous standards of accuracy have been exemplary.
S.W.W. G.T.
J.J. W.L.M.
GENERAL INTRODUCTION
THIS volume contains all the known plays and poems of William Shakespeare, a writer, actor, and man of the theatre who lived from 1564 to 1616. He was successful and admired in his own time; major literary figures of the subsequent century, such as John Milton, John Dryden, and Alexander Pope, paid tribute to him, and some of his plays continued to be acted during the later seventeenth and earlier eighteenth centuries; but not until the dawn of Romanticism, in the later part of the eighteenth century, did he come to be looked upon as a universal genius who outshone all his fellows and even, some said, partook of the divine. Since then, no other secular imaginative writer has exerted so great an influence over so large a proportion of the world’s population. Yet Shakespeare’s work is firmly rooted in the circumstances of its conception and development. Its initial success depended entirely on its capacity to please the theatre-goers (and, to a far lesser extent, the readers) of its time; and its later, profound impact is due in great part to that in-built need for constant renewal and adaptation that belongs especially to those works of art that reach full realization only in performance. Shakespeare’s power over generations later than his own has been transmitted in part by artists who have drawn on, interpreted, and restructured his texts as others have drawn on the myths of antiquity; but it is the texts as they were originally performed that are the sources of his power, and that we attempt here to present with as much fidelity to his intentions as the circumstances in which they have been preserved will allow.
Shakespeare’s Life: Stratford-upon-Avon and London
Shakespeare’s background was commonplace. His father, John, was a glover and wool-dealer in the small Midlands market-town of Stratford-upon-Avon who had married Mary Arden, daughter of a prosperous farmer, in or about 1557. During Shakespeare’s childhood his father played a prominent part in local affairs, becoming bailiff (mayor) and justice of the peace in 1568; later his fortunes declined. Of his eight children, four sons and one daughter survived childhood. William, his third child and eldest son, was baptized in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon, on 26 April 1564; his birthday is traditionally celebrated on 23 April—St. George’s Day. The only other member of his family to take up the theatre as a profession was his youngest brother, Edmund, born sixteen years after William. He became an actor and died at the age of twenty-seven: on the last day of 1607 the sexton of St. Saviour‘s, Southwark, noted ‘Edmund Shakspeare A player Buried in ye Church wth a forenoone knell of ye great bell, xxs.’ The high cost of the funeral suggests that it may have been paid for by his prosperous brother.
John Shakespeare’s position in Stratford-upon-Avon would have brought certain privileges to his family. When young William was four years old he could have had the excitement of seeing his father, dressed in furred scarlet robes and wearing the alderman’s official thumb-ring, regularly accompanied by two mace-bearing sergeants in buff, presiding at fairs and markets. A little later, he would have begun to attend a ‘petty school’ to acquire the rudiments of an education that would be continued at the King’s New School, an established grammar school with a well-qualified master, assisted by an usher to help with the younger pupils. We have no lists of the school’s pupils in Shakespeare’s time, but his father’s position would have qualified him to attend, and the school offered the kind of education that lies behind the plays and poems. Its boy pupils, aged from about eight to fifteen, endured an arduous routine. Classes began early in the morning: at six, normally; hours were long, holidays infrequent. Education was centred on Latin; in the upper forms, the speaking of English was forbidden. A scene (4.1) in The Merry Wives of Windsor showing a schoolmaster taking a boy named William through his Latin grammar draws on the officially approved textbook, William Lily’s Short Introduction of Grammar, and, no doubt, on Shakespeare’s memories of his youth.