Read William Shakespeare: The Complete Works 2nd Edition for Free Online

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    In some ways, the changes in Shakespeare’s practice as his art develops favour naturalism. Thus verse becomes freer, metaphor predominates over simile, rhyme and other formalistic elements are reduced, the proportion of prose over verse increases to the middle of his career (but then decreases again), some of his most psychologically complex character portrayals—Coriolanus, Cleopatra—come late. But his drama remains rooted in the conventions of a rhetorical, non-scenic (though not unspectacular) theatre: the supernatural looms largest in his later plays— Macbeth , Pericles, Cymbeline , and The Tempest. The Tempest draws no less self-consciously on the neo-classical conventions of five-act structure than The Comedy of Errors , and Prospero’s narration to Miranda (1.2) is as blatant a piece of dramatic exposition as Egeon’s tale in the opening scene of the earlier play. Heroines of the late romances—Marina (in Pericles ), Perdita (in The Winter’s Tale ), and Miranda (in The Tempest) —are portrayed with less concern for psychological realism than those of the romantic comedies—Viola (in Twelfth Night ) and Rosalind (in As You Like It )—and the revelation to Leontes at the end of The Winter’s Tale is both more improbable and more moving than the similar revelation made to Egeon at the end of The Comedy of Errors.
    The theatre of Shakespeare’s time was his most valuable collaborator. Its simplicity was one of its strengths. The actors of his company were the best in their kind. His audiences may not have been learned, or sophisticated, by modern standards; according to some accounts, they could be unruly; but they conferred popularity upon plays which for emotional power, range, and variety, for grandeur of conception and subtlety of execution, are among the most demanding, as well as the most entertaining, ever written. If we value Shakespeare’s plays, we must also think well of the theatrical circumstances that permitted, and encouraged, his genius to flourish.
     

    10. A performance of Julius Caesar in progress at the reconstructed Globe Theatre on Bankside, London

     

The Early Printing of Shakespeare’s Plays
     
    For all its literary distinction, drama in Shakespeare’s time was an art of performance; many plays of the period never got into print: they were published by being acted. It is lucky for us that, so far as we know, all Shakespeare’s finished plays except the collaborative Cardenio reached print. None of his plays that were printed in his time survives in even a fragment of his own handwriting; the only literary manuscript plausibly ascribed to him is a section of Sir Thomas More , a play not printed until the nineteenth century. In this edition of the Complete Works we replace the fragment previously offered with a newly edited text of the whole play. The only works of Shakespeare that he himself seems to have cared about putting into print are the narrative poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece . A major reason for this is Shakespeare’s exceptionally close involvement with the acting company for which he wrote. There was no effective dramatic copyright; acting companies commonly bought plays from their authors—as a resident playwright, Shakespeare was probably expected to write about two each year—and for whatever reason, companies generally preferred that their plays should not get into print except when they needed to raise money by selling them to publishers. Nevertheless, by one means and another, and in one form and another, about half of Shakespeare’s plays were printed singly in his lifetime, almost all of them in the flimsy, paperback format of a quarto—a book made from sheets of paper that had been folded twice, and normally costing sixpence. Some of the plays were pirated: printed, that is, in unauthorized editions, from texts that seem to have been put together from memory by actors or even, perhaps, by spectators, perhaps primarily to