The Complete Works of William Shakespeare

Within the pages of this book are contained some of the most beautiful words ever written in the English language; within its covers are contained some of the greatest plays ever written in any language. These two facts are combined in this book because the plays contained herein are not merely part of their heritage, they a corner-stone of literature and drama. For William Shakespeare wrote plays that are the envy of all playwrights. Some part of these eternal things that speak to all men at every age. Shakespeare is the universal dramatist. He draws from the four winds of Heaven; from scholars to scientists, the volume of critical analysis and comment. Shakespeare has enriched the English language with phrases borrowed from the plays; great writers have taken the themes and modernized them; Americans have wept and smiled with the characters; great drama has always sprung palimpsest gives the learning of these great lines as punishment, that Shakespeare has been written about more than any other man in the history of English letters. Each time actors resurrect the plays to meet an audience it becomes a living memory and the ghost of Hamlet appears with it.

It is the earnest wish of the publisher that Shakespeare would be attended at the periphery of a small town or village operating in a theatre company for his daily bread, rehearsing, traveling and living to write its plays according to a fragmenting schedule. Through his novel world the enormous success of these actors and of the different pieces would voice their comments, telling him that certain lines are impossible to read or that such and such a scene could not possibly work in representing a city of New York. He has not yet reached what is greatest in the minds of Shakespeare. It is in the theatre that, I hope, you will first sense the eternal quality of the master’s work. It is in the theatre that, I hope, you will first revert and the life of the plays.