Books in The New Clarendon Shakespeare series

This is the first fully annotated, critical edition of King Lear to appear for forty years. It includes a comprehensive account of Shakespeare's sources and the literary, political, and folkloric influences at work in the play, a detailed reading of the action, and a substantial stage history of major productions. Jay Halio is concerned to clarify, for those approaching the play for the first time, the vexed question of its textual history. Unlike previous editions, his does not present a conflation of the Quarto and the Folio. Accepting that we have two versions of equal authority, the one derived from Shakespeare's rough drafts, the other from a manuscript used in the playhouses during the seventeenth century, Professor Halio chooses the Folio as the text for this edition. He explains the differences between the two versions and alerts the reader to the rival claims of the Quarto by means of a sampling of parallel passages in the introduction and by an appendix which contains annotated passages unique to the Quarto.

This new edition of Shakespeare's most celebrated war play points to the many inconsistencies in the presentation of Henry V. Andrew Gurr's substantial introduction explains the play as a reaction to the decade of war which preceded its writing, and analyses the play's double vision of Henry as both military hero and self-seeking individual. Professor Gurr shows how the patriotic declarations of the Chorus are contradicted by the play's action. He places the play's more controversial sequences in the context of Elizabethan thought, in particular the studies of the laws and morality of war written in the years before Henry V. He also studies the variety of language and dialect in the play. The appendices summarise Shakespeare's debt to his dramatic and historical sources, while the stage history shows how subsequent centuries have received and adapted the play on the stage and in film.

An international team of scholars offers: • modernised, easily accessible texts • ample but unobtrusive academic guidance • attention to the theatrical qualities of each play and its stage history • informative illustrations, including reconstructions of early performances This play has attracted unprecedented interest in recent times. Professor Fraser takes account of its history, in which neglect and unpopularity have been important features, and discusses such reactions and the reasons for them. He argues for a play which is a powerful and often disconcerting blend of darkness and comedy, faults and virtues, failing and forgiveness. Beneath the fluctuating imagery there is a constant sexual undercurrent which compels unusual critical attention.

This play has been popular on the stage during the last three centuries and has proved itself admirably suited to adaptation as pure farce and musical spectacle. Professor Dorsch's account of staging pays special attention to the earliest known performance at Gray's Inn Hall during the Christmas revels of 1594. His full discussion of the classical and romance elements of the sources is followed by sections on characterisation and language which reveal the variety of pace and diction in the play, Shakespeare's metrical versatility and his use of imagery.

Shakespeare's As You Like It can appear bright or somber in performance: a feast of language and a delight for comic actors; or a risk-taking exploration of gender roles. This edition offers an account of what makes the play both innocent and dangerous, mapping the complexities of its setting (a no-man's-land related to both France and England) and giving an ample commentary on its language and an analytical account of performance.

This new edition of Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor focuses at every point on a theatrical understanding of the play. While emphasizing the liveliness of the play in stage terms, David Crane also claims that this citizen comedy needs to be taken much more seriously than in the past, as an expression of Shakespeare's fundamental understanding of human life, conveyed centrally in the character of Falstaff. In the process he also examines Shakespeare's free and vigorous use of different linguistic worlds within the play.