William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, Deluxe Edition by William Shakespeare Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, Deluxe Edition
Book Review: Overrated author
Summary: 2 Stars
The only ones who seem to like ol' Shakes are drama department queens. His plays are essentially empty souled affairs with emotions that are either shallow or excessively melodramatic. There is not a single recognizable flesh and blood human being in his plays. He lacks any consistent viewpoint so that his output all adds up to nothing. Don't waste your time.Book Review: Check This Guy Out
Summary: 4 Stars
This is a book with a lot of good stories in it. This guy can really write.Book Review: A false-economy buy
Summary: 1 Stars
To buy an unannotated Shakespeare volume like this, where even the quality of the text is in doubt, is a pure waste of money. Anyone who feels it is good enough to buy an unannotated text should at least make sure to get a good, well-edited one: for example, a second-hand copy of Peter Alexander's edition (the so-called "Tudor Edition", originally published by Collins in 1951). The text prepared by Alexander remains one of the very best. It really does matter what text one buys, as various editions differ greatly in the quality of what they produce. It is by no means the case that all editions of Shakespeare offer the same text, as one would expect if one bought a work by a modern author. Furthermore, it is impossible to read Shakespeare - even if you are a specialist in Renaissance literature - without plenty of help, none of which is supplied in this edition. A good edition, like that produced by David Bevington, or the Riverside, will contain the following helpful components as a minimum: a comprehensive introduction to Shakespeare and his work generally; reasonably full analytical/interpretative introductions to individual works; lists of further reading (referring the reader to other helpful commentators); and above all - most essentially - useful explanatory notes on words, phrases, and sentences difficult to understand. Of these there are a great many. Anyone who approaches Shakespeare as a modern reader without knowledgde of the language of his period will soon find all sorts of words and grammatical usages that obviously are no longer current. But even more treacherous are those many instances of words that LOOK the same, but MEAN something very different, as a result of the fact that the meaning of words changes over time.
For all these reasons, then, readers should spend their money on a value-for-money buy, whether new or second-hand, and not waste it on a worthless volume of this nature. If you don't want to buy a well-annotated one-volume Shakespeare, buy well-annotated editions of individual works - e.g. those belonging to the Arden series, or the Oxford Shakespeare, or the New Cambridge.
These reflections are not, of course, criticisms of Shakespeare as an author, but purely of a useless edition like this. ...
Book Review: Have no fear, the whole career of Shakespear is here.
Summary: 5 Stars
This by far is one of the best books I bought. It has most of Shakespears works printed in a split page bible style. I recommend this book highly and I also recommed A Shakespear Glossary to go with it.Book Review: Outstanding !!
Summary: 4 Stars
I have always wanted to read William Shakespeare but several of my friends who were English majors in college told me I was crazy. They even had trouble with it. I love it. I cant get enough. I read Hamlet first thing after I opened the package. I recommend it for anyone who wants to deversify and defy the tight boundry that people try to fit us all into. Buy...Its a "must have."