Comedies vol. 1: Volume 1 (Everyman's Library)

About this book

Shakespeare forged his tremendous art in the crucible of his comic imagination which throughout his life enveloped and contained his tragic one. His early comedieswith their baroque poetic exuberance intense theatricality explosive bursts of humor and superbly concrete realizations of the dialects of lovecapture as in a chrysalis all that he was to become. They provide a complete inventory of the mind of our greatest writer in the middle of his golden youth. This volume contains The Comedy of Errors The Taming of the Shrew The Two Gentlemen of Verona Loves Labors Lost A Midsummer Nights Dream and its companion piece Romeo and Juliet which Tony Tanner describes in his introduction as "a tragedy by less than one minute." The texts authoritatively edited by Sylvan Barnet are supplemented with textual notes bibliographies a detailed chronology of Shakespeares life and times and a substantial introduction in which Tanner discusses each play individually and in the context of Shakespeares oeuvre.