Théâtre Complet

by William Shakespeare

La grandeza de Shakespeare, la creación de un universo imaginario más real que la propia vida, toma forma en sus obras teatrales. Círculo presenta su teatro completo en un volumen que recoge las mejores traducciones al castellano desde el siglo XVIII hasta la actualidad. µngel-Luis Pujante, premio Nacional de Traducción, ha seleccionado los trabajos de autores como Leandro Fernández de Moratín, Vicente Molina Foix y Jacinto Benavente para ilustrar la influencia del autor inglés en España. Jaume Plensa, inspirado por la palabra de William Shakespeare, ha realizado una serie completa de 52 obras en las que aúna técnicas como la pintura y la fotografía y atrapa el alma y la esencia de los textos.

505 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1964

About the author

William Shakespeare was an English playwright, poet, and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon" (or simply "the Bard"). His extant works, including collaborations, consist of some 39 plays, 154 sonnets, three long narrative poems, and a few other verses, some of uncertain authorship. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare remains arguably the most influential writer in the English language, and his works continue to be studied and reinterpreted.
Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Sometime between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part-owner ("sharer") of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men after the ascension of King James VI and I of Scotland to the English throne. At age 49 (around 1613), he appears to have retired to Stratford, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive; this has stimulated considerable speculation about such matters as his physical appearance, his sexuality, his religious beliefs, and even certain fringe theories as to whether the works attributed to him were written by others.
Shakespeare produced most of his known works between 1589 and 1613. His early plays were primarily comedies and histories and are regarded as some of the best works produced in these genres. He then wrote mainly tragedies until 1608, among them Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, all considered to be among the finest works in the English language. In the last phase of his life, he wrote tragicomedies (also known as romances) and collaborated with other playwrights.
Many of Shakespeare's plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime. However, in 1623, John Heminge and Henry Condell, two fellow actors and friends of Shakespeare's, published a more definitive text known as the First Folio, a posthumous collected edition of Shakespeare's dramatic works that includes 36 of his plays. Its Preface was a prescient poem by Ben Jonson, a former rival of Shakespeare, that hailed Shakespeare with the now famous epithet: "not of an age, but for all time".

Reviews

[Alan · Rating 4 out of 5]

In my decades of teaching and studying Shakespeare in post-docs with great scholars like Marge Garber, Annabel Patterson, and Tom Greene (at the Folger) I have referred to this volume when I did not have their great libraries near, with also Russian and Italian translations of specific plays. I believe I picked this lonely volume (1 of 3) near Harvard three decades ago in a used bookstore.
Right now I'm amused to find how Shakespeare's French, Welsh, Scottish and Irish accents come through in Hugo. Editor Fort notes that it's difficult to find in French equivalents of French, Scottish and Welsh accents in English. So I was right to be curious. My French fails me, but the editor footnotes that Hugo employs Cajun to render Jamy's Scottish. Since I have written about Fluellen's great military reading despite his "bad English", and since I have been quoted in books on Sh & Wales (and Foreign Shakespeares), I am curious about the puns and accents. Fluellen's Welsh accent pronounces "p" as "b," so his signal mispronunciation is "where Alexander the Pig was born?" When Gower corrects him, Fluellen says, "is not 'pig' great? The pig or the great...are all one reckonings."
Hugo renders this Alexandre le Kros, "le kros n'est-il pas grand?"
Then there is Pistol's alliterative verse, a throwback to Langland and the Pearl Poet who in fact wrote around the time of the historical Henry V. Pistolet's grand language boosts him in the eyes of his French captive, though the reader knows he is not the equal of soldiers like Jamy and Fluellen.
Of course, Bardolph is the only soldier we know well (from Henry IV) who dies in the play, and perhaps we know the boy tending the baggage. Bardolph takes a French cross, a "Pax," while stealing has been forbidden. For this he is hung. It's very like the history teacher and soldier in Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, who is shot for stealing a teapot from the rubble of Dresden.