Complete Works of Shakespeare; Volume 1

by William Shakespeare

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Genres: Poetry, Drama, Classics

814 pages, Paperback

Published August 25, 2016

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

[Bill FromPA · Rating 5 out of 5]

Love's Labor's Lost 8/25
The Comedy of Errors 8/28 Menaechmi 8/29
The Two Gentlemen of Verona 9/1-2
Henry VI, Part 1 9/5-6
Henry VI, Part 2 9/9-10
Henry VI, Part 3 9/17-18
Richard III 9/21-22

Love's Labor's Lost - The play closest to the sonnets; Rosaline is a type of "dark lady". A play redeemed by its end - artificiality undercut by the intrusion of reality. Self-referential to comedy conventions which play frustrates.

The Comedy of Errors / Menaechmi -Shakespeare much improved upon Plautus; hints of later "romances", but obeying classical unities.

The Two Gentlemen of Verona - Interesting characters and situations, but everything is unbelievably resolved in little more than 100 lines at the end, making all the characters seem psychologically shallow.

Richard III - From past encounters I remember Richard as an absolute villain, self-consciously and flamboyantly evil as he lets flow rivers of blood in his ascent to the throne. Yes, well, he is that, as confirmed by my latest reading. As with prior encounters, I also found the play insightfully delineating the nature of a “strong man” dictatorship in ways that echoed non-fiction accounts of Stalin and Saddam Hussein, to take only two examples that came to mind. Was there more to Richard? This time around I noticed at least one incident where he stepped out of the pure villain role; this occurs in the famous lines after the newly widowed Anne has started to succumb to his courtship:

Was ever woman in this humor wooed?
Was ever woman in this humor won?
I’ll have her, but I will not keep her long.
What, I that killed her husband and his father,
To take her in her heart’s extremest hate,
With curses in her mouth, tears in her eyes,
The bleeding witness of my hatred by,
Having God, her conscience, and these bars against me,
And I no friends to back my suit at all
But the plain devil and dissembling looks?
And yet to win her, all the world to nothing!
Ha!

Wow, that out-of-meter Ha! is great. He expresses astonishment that he got away with that, he really didn’t expect to. This kind of doubt in his own efficacy is never expressed by Marlowe’s Barabas. Later, after he has persuaded Edward IV’s widow Elizabeth to entertain the idea of his marriage to her daughter, he has nothing but contempt for his victim, "Relenting fool and shallow, changing woman!" This is at least a small hint, not present in the extensive excerpts from Holinshed included in my edition, that Richard grows into his role of villain, and reinforces the idea that it is a role he has consciously chosen rather than being born into it by the nature of his physical deformities. Holinshed quotes “this rule of physiognomy”: "Distortum vultum sequitur distortio morum." (a person’s distorted character follows his distorted countenance) as an explanation for Richard. Shakespeare echoes this idea in speeches he gives both to Richard and others, but I sense a stirring here, however slight and hesitant at this point, of the idea that biology is not destiny, and responsibility for one’s own character and actions lies in the choices one makes for oneself.
It’s very interesting to see some of the things in Holinshed that Shakespeare chooses to adapt. Holinshed talks about the written indictment of Hastings posted immediately after his execution being so elaborately expressed and written so cleanly that its spoken composition would have taken up the time allotted between accusation and execution, let alone the writing out in a fair copy. Shakespeare was apparently so impressed with this that to make the point he added a character, a Scrivener, and scene (Act 3, Scene 6) that I imagine is always cut in stage productions.

[Dav · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Complete Works of William Shakespeare: All the Plays, All The Poems
(2 Volumes) Hardcover – 1974
by W. G. Clark (Editor), W. Aldis Wright (Editor) The works of William Shakespeare are arranged in chronological order, There is an introduction to each play, adapted from the Shakespearean primer of Professor Dowden.

Not a lover of Shakespeare? You're not alone. But, without Shakespeare we may have missed out on such quotables as: discretion is the better part of valor; all that glitters is not gold; It's Greek to me; eaten out of house and home, and many more.

Most alarming, without Shakespeare, Leonard McCoy would not have been able to quote, "Angels and ministers of grace, defend us!" in reference to Spock's ability to program the ship's computer for time travel, from memory, (Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home). That just wouldn't do.





Shakespeare’s Writing Style "William Shakespeare's early plays were written in the conventional style of the day, with elaborate metaphors and rhetorical phrases that didn't always align naturally with the story's plot or characters. However, Shakespeare was very innovative, adapting the traditional style to his own purposes and creating a freer flow of words. With only small degrees of variation, Shakespeare primarily used a metrical pattern consisting of lines of unrhymed iambic pentameter, or blank verse, to compose his plays. At the same time, there are passages in all the plays that deviate from this and use forms of poetry or simple prose." William Shakespeare Biography.com

[Liz]

Titus Andronicus - considered as either partially authored by WS or as part of his juvenalia.

Titus: "Some book there is that she [Lavinia] desires to see. / Which is it, girl, of these? Open them, boy [Lucius]. / But thou are deeper read, and better skill'd: / Come, and take choice of all my library, / And so beguile thy sorrow, till the heavens / Reveal the damn'd contriver of this deed." (p. 16, TA, Act IV, Scene II)

Chiron: "Aaron, I see thou wilt not trust the air / With secrets." (p. 18, TA, Act IV, Scene III)