For fans of the Bard is a deluxe box set of our three classic Shakespeare mini books:
William Shakespeare: The Complete Plays in One Sitting, Shakespeare: The Bard's Guide to Abuses and Affronts, and Love Sonnets of Shakespeare.
With this collection, readers will have access to comprehensive summaries of each of Shakespeare's 36 famous plays, the most eloquent of Shakespeare's insults, and love sonnets to woo the most sought-after lover.
The publication of this box set coincides with the BBC's Shakespeare Project 2016, which celebrates the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death.
William Shakespeare was born at Stratford upon Avon in April, 1564. He was the third child, and eldest son, of John Shakespeare and Mary Arden. Little is known of Shakespeare’s early life; but it is unlikely that a writer who dramatized such an incomparable range and variety of human kinds and experiences should have spent his early manhood entirely in placid pursuits in a country town. There is one tradition, not universally accepted, that he fled from Stratford because he was in trouble for deer stealing, and had fallen foul of Sir Thomas Lucy, the local magnate; another that he was for some time a schoolmaster.
When Shakespeare died fourteen of his plays had been separately published in Quarto booklets. In 1623 his surviving fellow actors, John Heming and Henry Condell, with the co-operation of a number of printers, published a collected edition of thirty-six plays in one Folio volume, with an engraved portrait, memorial verses by Ben Jonson and others, and an Epistle to the Reader in which Heming and Condell make the interesting note that Shakespeare’s ‘hand and mind went together, and what he thought, he uttered with that easiness that we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers.’
