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New staging for Bard

09.07.08 John Ryan

Macmillan and the Royal Shakespeare Company have teamed up to publish a new series of Shakespeare’s plays, taking the text from the RSC Complete Works to create a range of compact paperback editions.

The RSC Individuals will launch with standalone editions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Richard III, The Tempest and Hamlet, on 5th September (£6.99 p/b). The rest of the plays will be published in batches of five or six each spring and autumn, with the intention being to complete the set within three years.

Each of the books will provide a fully annotated text, detailed glossary and supporting material taken from the RSC Complete Works, which was published in April 2007. “You can’t put the complete works in your pocket, and there is something satisfying about reading a Shakespeare play in a handy form,” said editor Jonathan Bate, professor of Shakespeare and Renaissance literature at the University of Warwick. “The other reason that we did this was because we couldn’t put in all of the supporting material that we wanted in a complete works.”

The centrepiece of each book will be a “Director’s Cut” section, featuring interviews with three directors or actors per play. These include producer Peter Brook talking about The Tempest and Bill Alexander discussing Richard III. The plays will also be accompanied by a historical overview of each play in performance, from Shakespeare’s time to the present day. The series has been edited by Bate and Eric Rasmussen, professor of English at the University of Nevada.

Media John Ryan Books Macmillan Royal Shakespeare Company

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