The Essential Shakespeare Comedies Collection Synopsis
Shakespeare's six most influential and important comedies in one convenient volume!
In one volume, six of William Shakespeare's comic plays -- among the most significant and beloved plays ever written or performed. Included in this volume are:
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
The Merchant of Venice
Much Ado About Nothing
The Taming of the Shrew
The Tempest
Twelfth Night
This collection is based on the original Cambridge editions, first published for the general public in the 1860s, and is designed for reading pleasure. Unlike many comprehensive Shakespeare collections, this edition is designed to be the size of a standard mass market paperback, reasonably compact enough to carry in your briefcase or purse, but it features a font size large enough for easy reading in any setting, margins wide enough to be marked up by students of all ages, and paper durable enough for reading again and again.
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.’
