This new edition of one of Shakespeare's greatest history plays offers a freshly considered text fully alert to its intense theatrical aspects. A helpful Introduction discusses the play's structure, language, and performance history, and the notes provide an illuminating commentary on details of the text.

From the Royal Shakespeare Company - a modern, definitive edition of Shakespeare's tragi-comedy of youth and age, introducing the immortal Sir John Falstaff.

From the Royal Shakespeare Company - a modern, definitive edition of Shakespeare's profound exploration of a prince's coming of age and the rejection of old Jack Falstaff.

This engaging double-volume Handbook explores the Henry IV plays as texts for performance as they unfold, moment by moment, on the stage. With scene-by-scene commentary, and including an account of their life on stage, film and in criticism, this guide illuminates two plays that together rank as one of Shakespeare's greatest achievements.

From the Royal Shakespeare Company - a modern, definitive edition of Shakespeare's great exploration of patriotism and war.

Focusing on stage directions, implied stage action in the dialogue, and on production choices available at key moments, this Handbook treats the script like a rehearsal in progress and encourages the imagining of a physical narrative where the play's meanings and our responses are shaped by staged actions.

This new edition is based on the 1623 First Folio text and challenges conventional thinking about the nature and relationship of the earliest texts. It contributes substantial new evidence about Shakespeare's revision of the plays and the introduction and commentary focus on stage-oriented discussions of the play's meaning and reception.

This edition in the Oxford Shakespeare series completes the trilogy of Henry VI plays. In his introduction Michael Taylor considers the implications of the gap between first performance in 1592 and the play's first printed appearance in the 1623 folio. He discusses key issues such as language, structure, performance history, and the role of women in the play.

Shakespeare's Henry VI plays dramatize contemporary as much as Elizabethan issues: the struggle for power, the manoeuvres of politicians, social unrest, civil war. This edition draws on experience of the play in rehearsal and performance to focus on both its theatricality and contemporary relevance in a wide-ranging introduction and detailed commentary.

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This major new edition has been thoroughly revised and expanded to include five new chapters that illustrate the nature and impact of the new approaches to Shakespeare that have swept through literary studies in recent years: structuralism, poststructuralism, deconstruction, feminism, new historicism and cultural materialism.

Aims to recreate the turbulent times through which William Shakespeare lived: the age of the Reformation, the Spanish Armada, the Gunpowder Plot and the colonization of the Americas. Drawing on a range of sources, this work takes us back into Elizabethan England to reveal a man who is the product of his time.

This introductory guide to one of Jonson's most widely-studied plays offers a scene-by-scene theatrically aware commentary, a brief history of the text and first performances, case studies of key performances and productions, a survey of film and TV adaptations, and a wide sampling of critical opinion and further reading.

Modern editions of a popular and trusted series.

From the Royal Shakespeare Company - a modern, definitive edition of Shakespeare's drama of the conflict between one man's ambition and the good of the state.

This introductory guide to the first of Shakespeare's mature tragedies offers a scene-by-scene theatrically aware commentary, a brief history of the text and first performances, case studies of key performances and productions, a survey of film and TV adaptations, and a wide sampling of critical opinion and annotated further reading.

This edition of "Julius Caesar" provides a lively edition of one of Shakespeare's most familiar and studied plays. The introduction sets the play in the context of the last years of Elizabeth I's reign, with rebellion stirring and conflicts over the calendar.

David Scott Kastan's lucid exploration of the remarkable richness and ambitious design of "King Henry IV Part I" reveals the play to be almost a treatise on the central relationship between value and political authority.

The editor takes a broad look at the different meanings which have been attributed to "King Henry V", through a discussion of its various critical and theatrical interpretations.

In their introduction to this play, the editors show how the young Shakespeare, working closely from his chronicle sources, nevertheless freely shaped his complex material to make it both theatrically effective and poetically innovative.