Customer Reviews

Complete Works of Shakespeare, The (6th Edition)

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THE COMPLETE WORKS OF SHAKESPEARE. Updated Fourth Edition. Edited by David Bevington. 2000 pp. New York : Longman, 1997. ISBN 0-321-01254-2 (hbk.)

As complete Shakespeares go, the Bevington would seem have everything. Its book-length Introduction covers Life in Shakespeare's England; The Drama Before Shakespeare; London Theaters and Dramatic Companies; Shakespeare's Life and Work; Shakespeare's Language : His Development as Poet and Dramatist; Edition and Editors of Shakespeare; Shakespeare Criticism.

The texts follow in groups : Comedies; Histories; Tragedies; Romances (including 'The Two Noble Kinsmen'); Poems. Each play is given a separate Introduction adequate to the needs of a beginner, and the excellent and helpful brief notes at the bottom of each page, besides explaining individual words and lines, provide stage directions to help readers visualize the plays.

One extremely useful feature of the layout is that instead of being given the usual style of line numbering - 10, 20, 30, etc. - numbers occur _only_ at the end of lines which have been given footnotes - e.g., 9, 12, 16, 18, 32. Why no-one seems to have thought of doing this before I don't know, but it's a wonderful innovation that does away entirely with the tedious and time-wasting hassle of line counting, and the equally time-wasting frustration of searching through footnotes only to find that no note exists. If the line has a note you will know at once, and the notes are easy for the eye to locate as the keywords preceeding notes are in bold type.

The book - which is rounded out with three Appendices, a Royal Genealogy of England, Maps, Bibliography, Suggestions for Reading and Research, Textual Notes, Glossary of common words, and Index - also includes a 16-page section of striking color photographs.

The book is excellently printed in a semi-bold font that is exceptionally sharp, clear, and easy to read despite the show-through of its thin paper. It is a large heavy volume of full quarto size, stitched so that it opens flat, and bound, not with cloth, but with a soft decorative paper which wears out quickly at the edges and corners.

If it had been printed on a slightly better paper and bound in cloth, the Bevington would have been perfect. As it is, it's a fine piece of book-making nevertheless, and has been edited in such a way as to make the reading of Shakespeare as hassle-free and enjoyable an experience as possible. Strongly recommended for students and the general reader.

Students and various e-mail correspondents often ask me which single-volume Shakespeare edition I would recommend, and I never hesitate in naming this one, as I think it has a long lead over its rivals. I have myself used the 1992 printing with amazing frequency both in research and in teaching, and always with advantage.

Why is this the best edition for a reader who wants as much as possible within the confines of a single book? First, it should be pointed out that unannotated editions such as the Oxford Complete Works are all in all of comparatively little use as even expert Renaissance scholars - leave alone inexpert readers - cannot read Shakespeare's language unaided; there are simply far too many words, features of grammar, etc., which a modern reader is certain to interpret inaccurately or not to understand at all. So it is essential to have intelligent and well-informed annotation that will help one to understand the text. Bevington's is extraordinarily good: knowledgeable, precise, and helpfully clear.

Second, an editor needs to be able to produce a responsible modernised text. Shakespeare cannot be understood by many unless he is read in modern spelling, and the punctuation of his period, too, often leads most modern readers astray. Bevington's modernisation of the text is exemplary. Furthermore, his handling of the many thorny textual problems is also outstanding for the knowledge and the judgement that he brings to bear. For example, the Oxford people unwisely and on poor grounds print two separate versions of *King Lear*, and Bevington has been exceptional in rejecting that approach and producing a persuasively and intelligibly "conflated" text (much better, by the way, than the conflated version in the Arden text edited in 1997 by R.A. Foakes).

Most readers of the plays who are not already quite familar with them will want good, perceptive and comprehensive introductions to them, and in this area, too, Bevington excels, demonstrating an awareness of modern approaches and interests without falling victim to trendiness. He offers introductions which are never dull but, however exciting and illuminating, always sensible.

The general introductory and accompanying material made available elsewhere in the book is equally useful, revealing, and accurate; and the book is well produced. It is amazingly cheap for the remarkable value it offers.

This, then, is not only the best single-volume Shakespeare available, but is by any standard as good an edition as anyone could possibly expect. I add that in my personal view Bevington is probably the only scholar at present alive who could have produced so excellent a single-volume edition. Unreservedly recommended.

For beginners or long-time scholars of William Shakespeare's masterful works, one cannot go wrong with David Bevington's THE COMPLETE WORKS OF SHAKESPEARE. Bevington provides a concise but highly informative introduction to Shakespeare's England, engaging critical introductions to each play, and very extensive annotation to help clarify Shakespeare's more challenging archaic passages. Purchase this volume, and you will be purchasing a lifetime of reading enjoyment.

You get what you pay for, and you can get so much more for just a couple cents more. In this Kindle ebook, stage directions fall right inline with the text, undelimited, hard to distinguish from the dialogue. Also, the speaker's name is not offset. The Mobi edition Complete Works of William Shakespeare. 154 Sonnets, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, Hamlet, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, The Tempest, Julius Caesar, King ... Cressida, The Winter's Tale & more (mobi) is just a few cents more and puts stage directions in brackets and tabs in the speaker's name. Those are subtle differences that actually make a huge difference when reading the play.

Great find!!

Let me start this review by saying I am a huge Shakespeare fan as well as being a huge Kindle fan and I was looking for a Kindle collection that had everything in it from him. Now, I already know all his plays and poems and works, or at least I thought I did. I mean, I wasn't aware of these apocryphal plays. I mean, I've always wondered if the plays that we all know were the only ones he ever wrote, but I'd never really gone to find out. When I read the title and description I just had to see what this was about.

When I downloaded it, I must say I was so happy with this great find!! These additional plays were the first ones I went to look at and already just paging through all these new ones, written at different times in his career, has been so interesting!! I can't wait to get into them for real. I feel like I've gotten a new toy that I can play with!

I highly recommend it!!

The Complete Works of Shakespeare edited by David Bevington

Bevington's edition of Shakespeare's plays is a popular choice, and not without good reason. But that doesn't make an ideal choice. The introduction to this one volume edition is ample with chapters on life in Shakespeare's England, the drama before Shakespeare, Shakespeare's life and work. These are good, but they tend to rely on older scholarship and they may not be current. For example Bevington repeats Hinman's claim that there were 1200 copies of the 1623 Folio printed. However later scholars think the number was quite a bit lower, around 750. It should be said that we don't know for sure how many copies of the 1623 folio were printed and either number could be correct.

Bevington's edition prints the plays by genre. We get a section of Comedies, Histories, Tragedies, Romances and the Poems. He puts "Troilus and Cressida" with the comedies, though we know the play was slated to appear with the tragedies in the 1623 folio. The play was never meant to appear with the comedies, and all the surviving Folios that have the play have it at the beginning of the tragedies.

Let's get down to brass tacks. You are not going to buy an edition of Shakespeare's works because of good introduction. You're going to buy one because the quality of the editing of the plays. Is it reliable? Is it accurate? For the most part this edition is reliable and accurate, but that does not mean it is accurate and reliable in every instance.

Modernized editions of Shakespeare's plays and poems are norm. Since the 18th century (and even before) editors of Shakespeare have modernized and regularized Shakespeare's plays and poems. There are good reasons for this modernization. There is the reader's ease of use and the correcting misprints and mislination. I have no problem with this regularization of spelling or punctuation. But when an editor goes beyond normalizing and modernizing--when an editor interferes with the text then I have a problem.

Let me give two examples of the editorial interference that I am writing about:

King Lear 2-1-14 (p. 1184)
Bevington has:
Edmund
The Duke be here tonight? The better! Best!
This weaves itself perforce into my business.

The Folio has:
Bast. The Duke be here to night? The better best,
This weaues it selfe perforce into my businesse,

Even allowences made for modernization of punctuation and grammar would not account for Bevington's "The better! Best." Bevington glosses this to mean "so much the better; in fact the best that could happen." Nice try, but "The better best" of the folio is a double comparative, (which is a regular feature of Early Modern English) and not two separate adjectival phrases. Interestingly, the Quarto printing of Lear prints this scene in prose, and there is no punctuation between "better" and "best" in that version either.

A few lines down Lear 2-1-19 Edmund continues
Bevington has:
Brother, a word. Descend. Brother, I say!
Enter Edgar

But Bevington has reversed the order. The Folio has:
Enter Edgar.
Brother, a word, discend; Brother I say,

Bevington does not say why he changed the order, though to be fair other modern editors have done the same thing.

These two changes just a few lines apart go beyond regularization or modernization. They interfere with the text as presented in the 1623 Folio. And Bevington does not explain the changes. So next time you pick up this or any other modernized edition you should ask yourself "am I really sure what I'm reading is what Shakespeare wrote?"

I'll say that this is the greatest collection ever, but I would've like that the dialogs would be easier to read because there's no space between them. Can't blame that the publisher threw the ball outta the park with this one but just a suggestion for the publisher. BTW, this one has a good table of contents =)

Bevington's The Complete Works of Shakespeare is an excellent place to start or continue one's study of Shakespeare and the Rennaissance Period. This is the book we used in my Shakespeare class in college and I found it extremly helpful in understanding not only Shakespeare, but also Elizabethan England. Bevington includes plenty of pictures to help one see what it looked like in the middle to late 16th Century and early 17th Century. Also, Bevington includes indepth introductions to each of the plays and explanatory notes on words Shakespeare used in a different context from what we use them today. I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to start or continue to study the Bard.

I must say that I consider myself very well versed in Shakespeare and his works. I fell in love with them in high school and have continued to read and re read them. So when I was looking for a complete works collection that I could take along with me anywhere, I was most intrigued by the additional plays mentioned here. I have heard considerable debate about Shakespeare's authorship of certain plays and so I was most intrigued by the idea of these other plays.

Naturally, they were the first ones I began to read when I downloaded the collection. I must say that I find them fascinating on quite a few levels, bearing in mind the circumstances surrounding each. I find it quite absorbing to notice small literary allusions that I am finding to his other, more well-known plays, as well as seeing a development of style on his part.

I look forward to reading and re reading all of the plays at length.

I also find the Shakeaspeare bio illuminating. It seems his life was much like a soap opera.

I think this is definitely a worthwhile addition to anyone's library, especially anyone interested in Shakespeare, both devoted fans or people just beginning to delve into his works.

David Bevington gives us a well-researched and useful edition of William Shakespeare's complete works. The bard's plays are, of course, indescribably good, and would be in any edition. Thus, an editor's job is to provide annotations to explain archaic vocabulary or 16th Century references which would otherwise escape us, to give the reader the best text available--since Shakespeare's plays were originally not written for publication but only for production on the stage, this is a recurring problem--to write short introductions to plays which guide a reader about certain themes recurring in the play, and to provide other helpful material in a general introduction and in end notes. Bevington succeeds at all these tasks. His annotations are, as a rule, helpful without being intrusive. Bevington seems instinctively to know when a word or phrase needs to be explained and when a description of a phrase not immediately obvious to modern readers would be more harmful than helpful by breaking up the flow of the text. His introductions to each play are insightful. A good example of this is Bevington's introduction to Much Ado About Nothing in which he explains that the Sixteenth Century pronunciation of "Nothing" was the same as the pronunciation of "Noting." Since the play involves numerous instances of people overhearing other character's conversations, the play's title has a double meaning--i.e., it is both Much Ado About Nothing and Much Ado About Noting. Finally, Bevington's introductory and concluding general remarks are also quite good. For example, Bevington gives brief descriptions of the Elizabethan stage and the history of Shakespearean productions over the last four hundred years in his introduction. He also gives his take on the controversy over whether Shakespeare wrote all his plays himself. After the plays, he gives the sources of the text for the various plays, including how the plays were first published.