The Best Complete Shakespeare Collection

Hi everyone, I'm trying to find a luxury version of the Complete Works of William Shakespeare, including his plays, poetry, sonnets, etc. however, am having difficulty with this and hoped one of you Shakespeare fans would be able to help. The Easton Press has a 3-vol. version that is beautiful, but incomplete, and dated with Victorian scholarly attention. The Folio Society version is divided into 2 boxsets but these are not very pretty. Then there is the Folio Letterpress which costs as much as a sports car for the whole set.

Is there a leather-bound, or luxurious looking Complete Shakespeare that has been edited by either the Oxford University Press or other University presses? There is a Franklin Library edition but this is being sold for a rip off amount of $1000 on eBay, and I hoped to buy a new (in the package) version.

Any suggestions would be very much appreciated!

It's not clear here whether you want something mainly or only for its luxury appearance (interior and exterior) (sitting in the bookcase) or you are looking for a high-quality complete edition, text--chosen for its textual scholarly value and usefulness--in which case, its usefulness to an interested reader trumps what it (originally) looks like.

Is it for a gift to someone else?

Do you know if the person's interest is in reading it or just having it on the shelf for display?

________________________

this (current 2 vol. Oxford Univ. Press) edition might meet both types of needs. It is "authoritative" from a scholarly point of view and it's nice looking--though not necessarily "luxurious"-looking :

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-new-oxford-shakespeare-critical-refe... (approx. price : £195.00 (+ shipping) unless you buy it locally from a bookseller.)

You could alter that, however, if the purchase price + the cost of having a custom bookbinder put these two volumes under a beautiful leather exterior binding isn't beyond your reach financially. Thus, in that way, you'd end up with both a beautiful book set and a scholarly "authoritative" edition of the complete works.

Depends on what you call luxurious.

Folio released their commentary volumes for the Letterpress one as separate purchases. These are the Oxford hardcovers rebound in buckram. I find them quite handsome but YMMV and finding the full set may not be trivial. Here is one just for an example: http://www.foliosociety.com/book/HMX/oxford-hamlet. Of course you can just get the Oxford volumes themselves but I find the Folio ones more appealing visually.

However, the set I really like the most is the old Folio set (as discussed here https://www.librarything.com/topic/140780). Not completely what you have in mind but they are very well done, sit well in your hand and as long as the spines are not faded, look awesome on a shelf. Combine with something else and you have a complete set (I know it is cheating but could not not mention it).

And take a look https://www.librarything.com/topic/155833 - it may be an old thread but there had not been that many new ones published anyway :) And there are pictures for a lot of the sets and links to more discussions.

By the way - I do not really like the one-volume or all-in-3 volumes editions much. They take less place and they may look very good on a shelf but reading them is a bit of a torture. I have a few of them but any time I decide to read something, I grab a single volume...

And then there is the New Oxford: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-new-oxford-shakespeare-complete-set-... (or one of its components) or the Oxford Shakespeare itself: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-oxford-shakespeare-9780199267170?cc=...; if you insist on Complete in one book :)

Perhaps the best compromise between a finely-bound Shakespeare and an uptodate-on-scholarship Shakespeare might be the deluxe edition of the Riverside Shakespeare. It's two volumes in textured (pebbled?) cloth in a sturdy box. The paper is not FS quality but it's not tissue thin either like some large college texts. It includes all the plays and poems, with notes, introductions, glossary and textual collations. It has a couple sections of illustrations in b&w and color on glossy stock, but these are not artists' conceptions of the plays but rather contemporary images of Elizabethan actors, playhouses, manuscripts, etc.

Heres the 1974 edition which was red https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=22590009066&searchurl=tn%3...

Here's the more up-to-date 1997 edition which is black w red endpapers. https://www.borgantiquarian.com/pages/books/1686/g-blakemore-evans-eds-j-j-m-tob...

Of course Shakespeare scholarship has moved on since 1997, especially in the area of admitting collaborators to the canon: Thomas Nashe in 1 Henry VI, George Peele in Titus Andronicus, George Wilkins in Pericles, Thomas Middleton in Timon of Athens (and perhaps in Macbeth, measure for MEasure and All's Well), and John Fletcher in Henry VIII; along with more or less acceptance for certain 'apocryphal' plays as being in part by Shakespeare: Sir Thomas More, Edward III, Two Noble Kinsmen, Arden of Faversham, Double Falsehood (Cardenio) and a few others. All this is barely acknowledged by Riverside 1974; Riverside 1997 does include Edward III and the More additions but also includes the now-discredited Funeral Elegy.

The New Oxford is certainly monumental, in a way --and controversial-- but its four volumes are bound in cheap(ish) trade materials. And the plays aren't spread across four volumes, but rather one is all the works in a student edition, the next is all the works in an old-spelling edition; then a volume of annotations, and finally a volume dedicated to 'authorship', that is, attribution, collaboration, statistical analysis, etc.

I guess the fine press publishers aren't concerned with the latest scholarship and the publishers of the latest scholarship are not concerned with fine bindings, letterpress, etc.

(ETA missing word)

>3 AnnieMod:

"By the way - I do not really like the one-volume or all-in-3 volumes editions much. They take less place and they may look very good on a shelf but reading them is a bit of a torture. "

I agree with this. If the purpose is that the book(s) be actually read, then a one-or-two volume complete works is not very handy--but it is easier if for some reason one wants to carry all the plays and poems in one hand.

For detail and background I like, first, the edition on which David Bevington and Joseph Papp collaborated. From Bantam Books, it's the complete works in six paperback volumes and, though they are not at all a status symbol, they're crammed with interesting details; similarly, the Arden Shakespeare single-play, separate sonnets and poetry volume are also good for study; in every case, these editions are from people who, alas, have no idea who their subject author really was and unfortunately that does make a difference. All of them repeat utter nonsense because they cannot recognize certain long-standing errors which remain--at least one I know of--from their fallacious identification of the author.

But some people just want to have the book on the shelf and apparently most people are not smart enough to understand why they ought to give a damn about getting the author's identity right.

I agree with proximity1 (!) about the Ardens (and other single volume series such as those from Oxford and Cambridge) for the scholarship and ease of use. And probably the Bevingtons too -- can't say for sure because although I have those I haven't really used them. Bevington's editions are also collected into a nice-ish one-volume hardback though I don't know how much of the scholarly detail of the smaller format editions has been swept up into the larger. But it's definitely not in 'fine binding' territory, and as far as I can tell it hasn't been updated since 2003, so that puts it in Riverside territory as far as the currency of its scholarship.

Hi! Does anybody know if the Oxford - Folio Society collection of Shakespeare's works is going to be completed? It looks like what I am looking for -single-play hardcover, acid-free paper, sewn quality books at a reasonable price. Still, many seem to be no longer available. Are there any alternatives? I see an 8-volume edition available from Everyman Classics too.

>7 tespis: Does anybody know if the Oxford - Folio Society collection of Shakespeare's works is going to be completed?

It is complete - some of them are simply out of print/unavailable. These are basically the companions of the Folio's letterpress Shakespeare - the Oxford editions, bound in buckram. I doubt that they will print any more - they probably have enough to match the remaining letterpress copies -- plus a few extra just in case and they really do not need more.

Thanks a lot! More's the pity, then... I would have been happy to buy them, if I could have had them all.