About the Author

William Shakespeare was born in April 1564 in the town of Stratford-upon-Avon, on England's Avon River. When he was eighteen, he married Anne Hathaway. The couple had three children--an older daughter Susanna and twins, Judith and Hamnet. Hamnet, Shakespeare's only son, died in childhood. The bulk of Shakespeare's working life was spent in the theater world of London, where he established himself professionally by the early 1590s. He enjoyed success not only as a playwright and poet, but also as an actor and shareholder in an acting company. Although some think that sometime between 1610 and 1613 Shakespeare retired from the theater and returned home to Stratford, where he died in 1616, others believe that he may have continued to work in London until close to his death.

Barbara A. Mowat is Director of Research emerita at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Consulting Editor of Shakespeare Quarterly, and author of The Dramaturgy of Shakespeare's Romances and of essays on Shakespeare's plays and their editing.

Paul Werstine is Professor of English at the Graduate School and at King's University College at Western University. He is a general editor of the New Variorum Shakespeare and author of Early Modern Playhouse Manuscripts and the Editing of Shakespeare and of many papers and articles on the printing and editing of Shakespeare's plays.

Reviews

Gr 7-9ÄThis effort fails miserably as an introduction to the play or as a review tool for high school students. Plenty of well-written treatments exist at a variety of lengths and language levels that present the story with some of the verve it deserves. Given the choice here of short words and sentences and choppy, one-to-three sentence paragraphs, this British import may well have been intended for reluctant readers. If so, any advantage of the extreme simplicity of language is overbalanced by the truly dreadful illustrations. Anyone struggling with Shakespeare would be further turned off by these blurry, careless, unpleasant black-and-white drawings that face every page of text. Random and often inaccurate definitions at the bottoms of a few text pages and equally random-seeming quotations under the illustrations complete this unappealing package.ÄSally Margolis, Barton Public Library, VT

The three individual plays launch the third edition of the venerable "Arden Shakespeare" series, which will see the entire canon reproduced in superior scholarly editions by the year 2000. The First Folio is a facsimile edition of the original 1623 publication of the bard's works.