The Complete Plays

What It Is

The working output of a commercial dramatist between about 1590 and 1613: comedies, histories, tragedies, and the strange late plays that fit none of those boxes. Shakespeare wrote for a specific company, for specific actors, in a hurry, and he took nearly all his plots from books other people had written.

Roughly half of them survive only because two of his colleagues collected them into the First Folio of 1623, seven years after he died. Without that book we would have no Macbeth, no Tempest, no Twelfth Night.

They are scripts. That is the single most useful thing to know before you begin. They are unfinished on the page and complete only in a mouth, and every difficulty you meet reading them was invisible to an illiterate apprentice standing in the pit for a penny.

Why It Matters

The language first. He wrote at the moment English was expanding faster than at any time before or since, and he pushed it: coining, compounding, using nouns as verbs, saying things that had not previously been sayable. A surprising amount of your own idiom came from these plays and arrived in your mouth without attribution.

Then the interiors. Before Shakespeare, characters on the English stage announce what they are. In these plays they argue with themselves, want incompatible things, lie to themselves and are heard doing it. That capacity, more than any plot or line, is what later writers took from him, and it is why the novel eventually became possible.

He is also the most performed and most translated body of work on earth, and every generation finds its own preoccupations already in there waiting. That is not mysticism. He wrote characters capacious enough to be read many ways, and then declined to tell you which way was right.

Before You Read

Do not read a Complete Works cover to cover. It is a library, not a reading project, and the people who claim to have done it in a year are lying about how much attention they paid.

Read one play across two or three sittings, then see it, or listen to it. The Arkangel full-cast audio recordings cover the whole canon and will teach you more in an hour than any set of notes.

The difficulty is compression, not vocabulary. Shakespeare packs three thoughts into a line and moves on. Read the footnotes on the first pass through a scene, then read the scene again without them; the second pass is where it opens.

Start with Twelfth Night, Macbeth, or Henry IV Part 1. Do not start with Titus Andronicus or the Henry VI plays.

Which Edition to Read

• The RSC Complete Works, edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen (Macmillan) — recommended. Built on the First Folio, set in a single column that lets the verse breathe, with notes at the foot of the page written for people who intend to speak the lines. The introductions are short, sharp and free of jargon. It is the most usable one-volume Shakespeare there is. The cost: being Folio-based, it relegates passages that survive only in the quartos, so a few famous lines in Hamlet and King Lear are not where you expect them. View on Amazon →
• The Norton Shakespeare, edited by Stephen Greenblatt and others (third edition, 2016). The academic standard, using the Oxford text, with the best introductions and contextual documents anywhere. The cost: two columns of small type in a very heavy book, and the apparatus is a university course you did not enrol in.
• The Arden Shakespeare, Third Series (individual volumes). The fullest annotation available for a single play, and the right choice when you want to live inside one text. The cost: sold play by play, so it is expensive across a canon, and the introductions run past a hundred pages and discuss the plays in full. Read them afterwards.

Buy the RSC for the shelf and a Folger paperback for the play you are reading this week. The Folger editions are cheap, clean, and put the glosses on the facing page, which is the right design for a book you take to the theatre.

Getting the Most From This Book

Read aloud, badly, alone. It is not optional. The rhythm carries meaning that the eye skates over.

Watch a production before or during, not after. Purists disagree. The purists are wrong, and they are also the reason people give up.

Do not look up every word. Shakespeare's audiences missed things constantly, and the plays are built to work anyway.

The commonest mistake is reverence. He was a working writer with a payroll to meet, some of the plays are better than others, and saying so out loud is the beginning of actually reading him.