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 dark green buckram, pale grey paper boards with a design by Richard Shirley Smith, pale grey endleaves. Four volumes in each of two dark red slipcases titled and decorated in gold.