Shakespeare - The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works

Table of Contents

Martin Droeshouts engraving of Shakespeare, first published on the title-page of the First Folio (1623)

To the Reader

This figure that thou here seest put,
It was for gentle Shakespeare cut,
Wherein the graver had a strife
With nature to outdo the life.
O, could he but have drawn his wit
As well in brass as he hath hit
His face, the print would then surpass
All that was ever writ in brass!
But since he cannot, reader, look
Not on his picture, but his book.

BEN JOHNSON

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ISBN 0-19-926717-O (hbk)

ISBN 0-19-926718-9 (pbk)

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WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

THE COMPLETE WORKS

with a General Introduction, and Introductions to individual works, by

STANLEY WELLS

The Complete Works has been edited collaboratively under the General Editorship of Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor. Each editor has undertaken prime responsibility for certain works, as follows:

STANLEY WELLS The Two Gentlemen of Verona; The Taming of the Shrew; Titus Andronicus; Venus and Adonis; The Rape of Lucrece; Loves Labours Lost; Much Ado About Nothing; As You Like It; Twelfth Night; The Sonnets and A Lovers Complaint; Various Poems (printed); Othello; Macbeth; Antony and Cleopatra; The Winters Tale

GARY TAYLOR I Henry VI; Richard III; The Comedy of Errors; A Midsummer Nights Dream; Henry V; Hamlet; Troilus and Cressida ; Various Poems (manuscript); Alls Well That Ends Well; King Lear ; Pericles; Cymbeline

JOHN JOWETT Richard II; Romeo and Juliet; King John; I Henry IV; The Merry Wives of Windsor; 2 Henry IV; Julius Caesar; Sir Thomas More; Measure for Measure; Timon of Athens; Coriolanus; The Tempest

WILLIAM MONTGOMERY The First Part of the Contention; Richard Duke of York; Edward III; The Merchant of Venice; All Is True; The Two Noble Kinsmen

American Advisory Editor S. Schoenbaum

Textual Adviser G. R. Proudfoot

Music Adviser F. W. Sternfeld

Editorial Assistant Christine Avern- Carr

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

THE preparation of a volume such as this would be impossible without the generosity that scholars can count on receiving from their colleagues, at home and overseas. Among those to whom we are particularly grateful are: R. E. Alton; John P. Andrews; Peter Beal; Thomas L. Berger; David Bevington; J. W. Binns; Peter W. M. Blayney; Fredson Bowers; A. W. Braunmuller; Alan Brissenden; Susan Brock; J. P. Brockbank; Robert Burchfield; Lou Burnard; Lesley Burnett; John Carey; Janet Clare; Thomas Clayton; T. W. Craik; Norman Davis; Alan Dessen; E. E. Duncan-Jones; K. Duncan-Jones; R. D. Eagleson; Philip Edwards; G. Blakemore Evans; Jean Fuzier; Hans Walter Gabler; Philip Gaskell; A. J. Gurr; Antony Hammond; Richard Hardin; G. R. Hibbard; Myra Hinman; R. V. Holdsworth; E. A. J. Honigmann; T. H. Howard-Hill; MacD. P. Jackson; Harold Jenkins; Charles Johnston; John Kerrigan; Randall McLeod; Nancy Maguire; Giorgio Melchiori; Peter Milward; Kenneth Muir; Stephen Orgel; Kenneth Palmer; John Pitcher; Eleanor Prosser; S. W. Reid; Marvin Spevack; R. K. Turner; E. M. Waith; Michael Warren; R. J. C. Watt; Paul Werstine; G. Walton Williams; Laetitia Yeandle.

We are conscious also of a great debt to the past: to our predecessors R. B. McKerrow and Alice Walker, who did not live to complete an Oxford Shakespeare but whose papers have been of invaluable assistance, and to the long line of editors and other scholars, from Nicholas Rowe onwards, whose work is acknowledged in William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion .

We gratefully acknowledge assistance from the staff of the following libraries and institutions: the Beinecke Library, Yale University; the Birmingham Shakespeare Library; the Bodleian Library, Oxford; the British Library; the English Faculty Library, Oxford; the Folger Shakespeare Library; Lambeth Palace Library; St. Johns College, Cambridge; the Shakespeare Centre, Stratford-upon-Avon; the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham; Trinity College, Cambridge; the Victoria and Albert Museum; Westminster Abbey Library.

Many debts of gratitude have also been incurred to persons employed in a variety of capacities by Oxford University Press. Among those with whom we have worked especially closely are Linda Agerbak, Sue Dommett, Oonagh Ferrier, Paul Luna, Jamie Mackay, Louise Pengelley, Graham Roberts, Maria Tsoutsos, and Patricia Wilkie. John Bell started it all, Kim Scott Walwyn made sure we finished it, and from beginning to end Christine Avern-Carrs meticulous standards of accuracy have been exemplary.

S.W.W. G.T.
J.J. W.L.M.

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

THIS volume contains all the known plays and poems of William Shakespeare, a writer, actor, and man of the theatre who lived from 1564 to 1616. He was successful and admired in his own time; major literary figures of the subsequent century, such as John Milton, John Dryden, and Alexander Pope, paid tribute to him, and some of his plays continued to be acted during the later seventeenth and earlier eighteenth centuries; but not until the dawn of Romanticism, in the later part of the eighteenth century, did he come to be looked upon as a universal genius who outshone all his fellows and even, some said, partook of the divine. Since then, no other secular imaginative writer has exerted so great an influence over so large a proportion of the worlds population. Yet Shakespeares work is firmly rooted in the circumstances of its conception and development. Its initial success depended entirely on its capacity to please the theatre-goers (and, to a far lesser extent, the readers) of its time; and its later, profound impact is due in great part to that in-built need for constant renewal and adaptation that belongs especially to those works of art that reach full realization only in performance. Shakespeares power over generations later than his own has been transmitted in part by artists who have drawn on, interpreted, and restructured his texts as others have drawn on the myths of antiquity; but it is the texts as they were originally performed that are the sources of his power, and that we attempt here to present with as much fidelity to his intentions as the circumstances in which they have been preserved will allow.