Riverside Shakespeare

Any effort to put together an edition of the collected works of Shakespeare including annotations, introductions to plays, Shakespeare's life and times and the sources Shakespeare worked from is a colossal task, but the Riverside Shakespeare deals with it very efficiently, and everything that you'd expect from a collected works is there. I particularly like the enlightening introductory essays that precede each play, and the long introduction to Shakespeare's life, as well as theatre in Elizabethan England. Of course, one cannot expect the lengthy introductions or the superb annotations of the Arden Shakespeare, otherwise the Riverside Shakespeare would amount to 8000 pages rather than the 2000 that it is comprised of. Instead, the notes are brief and concise, but serve their function faultlessly, and I found that reading Pericles from the Riverside Shakespeare enabled me to understand the play almost as well as if I had been using the Arden edition. I read the play for the second time from Arden, and the only new thing I discovered was the detailed discussion of Shakespeare's sources; other than that, I did not feel as if the Riverside Shakespeare version lacked anything For an indepth study of a play I would recommend buying an individual edition, such as the Arden or Oxford Shakespeare, but for other purposes (like reading for pleasure or for an introduction to Shakespeare) this is a perfect and concise edition.

This is a marvellous collection, with helpful spacing, notes, and a useful introduction to each piece. There are excellent colour plates and a sizeable chunk of introductory history and context. Nothing is absent, and therefore nothing to complain about.