Entertaining and informative, this 1956 anthology paints a vivid picture of the world in which Shakespeare lived. Using the playwright's life as the framework – his birth, his education, his move to London, his life in theatre, his death – the book uses selected extracts from key Elizabethan publications to embody the atmosphere of this period. From sport to superstition, from festival to fashion, from the plague to playhouses, the significant features of the age are described through its prose, providing the reader with first-hand accounts of the conditions in which Shakespeare's masterpieces were created. All chapters are prefaced with illustrative Shakespearean quotations; the collection representing a commentary on the work as well as the life of Shakespeare. All texts have been modernised to assist the reader, and a glossary is included which explains names, unfamiliar words and difficult passages.
John Dover Wilson's New Shakespeare, published between 1921 and 1966, became the classic Cambridge edition of Shakespeare's plays and poems until the 1980s. The series, long since out-of-print, is now reissued. Each work is available both individually and as a set, and each contains a lengthy and lively introduction, main text, and substantial notes and glossary printed at the back. The edition, which began with The Tempest and ended with The Sonnets, put into practice the techniques and theories that had evolved under the 'New Bibliography'. Remarkably by today's standards, although it took the best part of half a century to produce, the New Shakespeare involved only a small band of editors besides Dover Wilson himself. As the volumes took shape, many of Dover Wilson's textual methods acquired general acceptance and became an established part of later editorial practice, for example in the Arden and New Cambridge Shakespeares.
John Dover Wilson's New Shakespeare, published between 1921 and 1966, became the classic Cambridge edition of Shakespeare's plays and poems until the 1980s. The series, long since out-of-print, is now
