Stephen Orgel

"Lady Anna" was written in 1871 and first published in 1874. It tells the story of Lady Lovel, whose ambitious marriage to the ill-reputed Earl Lovel left her with a child of questionable legitimacy. When her daughter, Lady Anna, is nearly twenty one, the Earl dies and his fortune is left to a distant nephew. Lady Anna must now decide to marry the young Frederick Lovel for money, or to disregard her mother's vicious meddling and marry her true love...

"The title Wit's Treasury alludes to Francis Meres's Palladis Tamia: Wits Treasury; Being the Second Part of Wits Commonwealth, published in 1598. The book has become famous for its early appreciation of Shakespeare, but its relevance to this project is its assumption that the way to praise contemporary English literature was by comparing it with that of Greece and Rome through a "comparative discourse," Elizabethan England is declared part of Palladis...

"In his own time, Shakespeare was best known to the reading public as a poet, and even today copies of his Sonnets regularly outsell everything else he wrote. For this new edition, Stephen Orgel offers a warmly personal and original introduction to Shakespeare's best-loved and most widely read poems. Careful readings emphasise their sexual and temperamental ambiguity, their textual history and the special perils an editor faces when modernising the...

Del Vecchio and Hammond reject the notion that Pericles is corrupt and of divided authorship. In their commentary on the play they show the similarities to the King Lear quarto and regard the calumny as unproven and misleading.

The Winter's Tale is one of Shakespeare's most varied, theatrically self-conscious, and emotionally wide-ranging plays. This 2007 edition provides a newly-edited text, a comprehensive introduction that takes into account current critical thinking, and a detailed commentary on the play's language designed to make it easily accessible to contemporary readers. Much of the play's copiousness inheres in its generic intermingling of tragedy, comedy, romance,...

Contains the complete text to all of Shakespeare's poems and plays; includes footnotes and an introduction to Shakespeare's life and times.

This is the most extensively annotated edition of Macbeth currently available, offering a thorough reconsideration of one of Shakespeare's most popular plays. A full and accessible introduction studies the immediate theatrical and political contexts of Macbeth's composition, especially the Gunpowder Plot and the contemporary account of an early performance at the Globe. It treats such celebrated issues as whether the Witches compel Macbeth to murder;...