The Complete Plays

This volume collects Shakespeare's plays: the early histories of the Wars of the Roses and the later English chronicle plays; the comedies of lovers, twins, and city wits; the tragedies of Hamlet, Lear, Othello, Macbeth, and the Roman pieces; and the late romances of shipwreck, lost children, and reunion. Courts, battlefields, forests, and islands are the usual stages. Recurring concerns are kingship, jealousy, mercy, and the making of a match. The texts are dramas for performance, not poems alone. The book is the dramatic canon, not the narrative poems or the sonnets.

Quarter-bound in dark red buckram with paper covers printed with a gold pattern. Two dark blue three-volume slipcases or a single dark blue six-volume slipcase, both with gilt signature on front.