The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare (Easton Press Collector's Edition)

DOBSON, Michael & Stanley WELLS (eds.). The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare. Norwalk, Connecticut: The Easton Press, 2002.

Quarto. Full burgundy leather. Spine with raised bands, 22-carat gilt accents. Gilt design and lettering to covers. All edges gilt. Moiré silk endpapers. Satin ribbon page marker. 541 pp. Over 3,000 entries and more than 100 photographs and illustrations throughout. Bookplate present but unadhered. Collector's Edition. Originally published Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

William Shakespeare (1564–1616) has generated, in the four centuries since his death, an industry of scholarship, performance, adaptation, and cultural commentary that shows no sign of contraction. The bibliography of writing about Shakespeare is the largest in any language devoted to a single author. His plays have been performed continuously since he wrote them; they have been translated into every major language; they have been adapted into opera, film, and ballet; they have been argued over by critics, philosophers, psychologists, and politicians; and the question of whether the man from Stratford actually wrote them has occupied a small but indefatigable community of doubters since the nineteenth century. The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare, edited by Michael Dobson and Stanley Wells — two of the most distinguished Shakespeare scholars of their generation — is the single most comprehensive one-volume reference to this entire landscape.

Dobson was at the time of publication a Professor of Shakespeare Studies at King's College London, subsequently Director of the Shakespeare Institute; Wells served as Professor of Shakespeare Studies at the University of Birmingham and as Chairman of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. Between them they brought to the project both formidable scholarly authority and an understanding of the full range of Shakespeare's cultural life that extends well beyond academic criticism into performance and popular culture.

The Companion's more than 3,000 entries range across the complete works — every play, poem, and sonnet described and contextualised — the life and the world that produced it, the critical tradition from the seventeenth century to the present, the history of performance on the English stage and in international theatre, the film adaptations from the silent era to the contemporary, and Shakespeare's reception in countries from China to the United States to Brazil. Longer articles provide extended treatment of major subjects: the Chamberlain's Men, censorship, the playhouses, the biographical controversies, and the global circulation of the works. Over a hundred photographs and illustrations supplement the text.

Fine. Presenting as new. Bookplate present but unadhered.

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Catalogue Number: HH000594