The Complete Works

William Shakespeare’s The Complete Works brings together the plays and poetry of the greatest dramatist in the English language, whose extraordinary understanding of human nature has shaped literature, theatre and the way we speak about ourselves. Written across the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, these works range from the exuberant comedy of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Much Ado About Nothing to the political machinations of Macbeth, King Lear and Julius Caesar, alongside the great tragedies of Hamlet and Othello. Kings and clowns, lovers and usurpers, philosophers and fools inhabit a world in which ambition, jealousy, desire, power and mortality are explored with unmatched psychological acuity. The collection also encompasses the sonnets and other poetry, revealing a writer whose command of language is as remarkable on the intimate scale of a lyric as it is in the grandeur of the theatre.

First published in collected form in 1623 as the First Folio, seven years after Shakespeare’s death, the plays have since become an enduring foundation of the literary canon, continually reinterpreted on stages and in classrooms around the world. Shakespeare’s language moves effortlessly between wit and tenderness, philosophical reflection and earthy comedy, offering fresh discoveries with every reading. The Complete Works is both a record of an astonishing creative life and an invitation to encounter the richness, contradictions and enduring vitality of the human experience through drama and poetry.

From the book

"We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep."

— William Shakespeare, The Tempest

On The Complete Works

“He was not of an age, but for all time!”

— Ben Jonson, To the Memory of My Beloved, the Author Mr William Shakespeare