Product Description

William Shakespeare (1564-1616) is acknowledged as the greatest dramatist of all time. He excels in plot, poetry and wit, and his talent encompasses the great tragedies of Hamlet, King Lear, Othello and Macbeth as well as the moving history plays and the comedies such as A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Taming of the Shrew and As You Like It with their magical combination of humour, ribaldry and tenderness. This volume is a reprint of the Shakespeare Head Press edition, and it presents all the plays in chronological order in which they were written. It also includes Shakespeare's Sonnets, as well as his longer poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #18466 in Books
• Published on: 1996-08-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 1280 pages

Customer Reviews

The Complete Works Of Shakespeare
I was looking for a book which contained the plays of Shakespeare as I needed to select which would be most appropriate to use as a drama workshop. I chose this book because it was very cheap.

The book is very chunky and it features ALL his plays and major poems/sonnets. Each page has two columns of text in very small print, so if you don't have good eye sight, I wouldn't recommend this book. It's also quite smudgy and the text is quite cramped. I don't feel this book is suitable to work from, to annotate etc.. However, it is as useful as a dictionary when it comes to looking up quotes and is brilliant to have around in order to recommend speeches to students. It also has a very useful Glossary at the back for those words which are uncommon/not used nowadays and includes information from the original folio.

To summarise... a book very worth the money, useful as a point of reference but not a book to be worked from.

Very good as a reference
While this is perhaps not the ideal book for study or part learning, it is very good as a reference. While the layout is quite condensed, the print small it is all very clear and this seems a reasonable volume for those with an interest in the works of Shakespeare...the value is excellent.

England's greatest writer
William Shakespeare is renowned for being England's greatest writer, and arguably the greatest writer the World has ever known. Most people will have come across Shakespeare in one form or another, whether it be reading him at school, hearing his works quoted, or seeing a film that is based on one of his plays. The borrowings from Shakespeare are wide and varied, and many day to day sayings such as "Cruel to be kind", "Too much of a good thing" and "Wild-goose chase" all have their origins in Shakespeare.

This book is a collection of all 37 plays, all 152 sonnets and some of his longer poems. They don't have to be read in order, and there is no reason to read all of them in one sitting - it's just great to be able to pick up a single volume to be able to read 'King Lear', or 'Hamlet', or 'Henry V' whenever the mood takes you. There is something for every mood here, from lightweight comedy to dark, harrowing tragedy.

My only criticism is that with a book this large it is often hard to keep a softcover edition in good condition. It needs a little more looking after, so if you want to keep this fantastic collection of literary works in good condition, do yourself a favour and get a hardcover edition, but for those on a budget, this is an ideal way to get your hands on some of the greatest literature ever written!