Reader Reviews for Complete Works of William Shakespeare:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: In defense of Shakespare
Comment: I posted these comments in response to one of amazon's top 500 reviewers whose review can basically be summed up as "Shakespeare is old hat, I don't like him, and therefore he deserves to be forgotten." Since I have seen other reviews of Shakespeare on amazon that take the form of "Shakespeare? Yecch. Now, Top Gun, that's something worth seeing!," I thought I would post these comments as their own review. Just writing these comments has rekindled my enthusiasm for the great Bard, not that it needed rekindling.
By the way, I think this edition, as several have pointed out, has a real place on the bookshelf of the Shakespeare lover. One way I enjoy reading Shakespeare is while following along with a recording, of which fortunately there have been many good ones, going back at least as far as the wonderful Argo series back in the 1950s and 1960s, and completed in time for the 400th anniversary of the Bard's birth in 1964. When following with an annotated edition, I am way too tempted to keep checking the notes. When following with this or another bare-bones text, the temptation is automatically gone.
Now, on to my comment:
I deleted my original comments some time ago, having realized that I couldn't respond to Jmark's lengthy remarks about Shakespeare in just a few pithy words, and so I only ended up misrepresenting myself and Shakespeare (not that he needs me to defend him). I resolved to make a lengthier, more reasoned, and less personal response to Jmark's diatribe at a future date.
Having re-read Jmark's review and his responses to my remarks, and deduced what I must have originally said in the comments I deleted, I still am of the opinion that his arguments don't hold water. His essential argument is that "I don't like Shakespeare and therefore he deserves to be relegated to the trash heap." Certainly Jmark is entitled not to like Shakespeare, just as I am entitled not to like Michael Jackson; it's the "therefore" part that makes no sense. To answer his assertions one by one:
1) If Shakespeare were not a vital author, nobody past the age of being influenced by the educational system would pay any attention to him. Certainly he would have been forgotten ages ago since the teachers who had been forced to read him when going through the deluded educational system would have rebelled against the idea of teaching such claptrap when they joined that system.
2) "Silly romances," "boring dramas," "improbable plots," "vulgar jokes" are all value judgments and relate back to Jmark's "I don't like Shakespeare" thesis (well, some of the jokes *are* pretty vulgar). If Jmark finds the romances silly and the dramas boring, he certainly has a right to. I doubt I've ever judged a play, movie, opera, etc. (especially opera) on the probability of its plot. I love Crank also and it's probably fairly improbable, although I don't expect folks to be watching Crank 400 years from now, assuming that civilization hasn't self-destructed by then; as for Crank 2, well once was enough given the level of its violence. I look at how well the story is told; Jmark and I will have to agree to disagree on this one.
3) Actually, the "nuts" do get to have it both ways. On the one hand, Shakespeare does deserve to be approached with a certain degree of reverence, which doesn't take Jmark's comments about "no one must dare question" out of the realm of hyperbole. And on the other hand, the plays themselves *are* entertaining, enormously so. As two examples, and these from a couple of the lesser-known plays, I offer the scenes in Much Ado About Nothing where Beatrice and Benedict are tricked into believing that the other is in love with her/him or the ending of the Cymbeline where all the plot twists are more or less straightened out to the hilarity of the audience; actually, these are both pretty improbable which doesn't take away from their entertainment value. I have kept to comic scenes here, although Cymbeline is usually classed among the tragedies or more recently among a new genre called the romances. It would be just as easy to find entertaining scenes among the tragedies or the histories, and I'll let each person do that for him- or herself. Actually, the comparison with Crank 2 is not completely off the wall; Titus Andronicus is at least as violent as Crank, but Shakespeare's poetry and the strength of some of the characterizations raise the play way above the level of Crank 2.
4) The comparison with Beowulf is patently unfair. When reading Beowulf, one would need to have a glossary of every word in order to make sense of it at all. In Shakespeare, only some words need to be glossed and, with a little experience, one will not need to check all of the glosses because a lot of the phrases and constructions are used over and over again. Likewise, most members of a Shakespeare audience will not have read the play in advance; it doesn't matter because, with a little attention, one can follow the story even without understanding every single word because the inflections of the actors and the stage business make it clear and carry the viewer along. The same could not be said of a performer presenting Beowulf in the original English.
5) The "intriguing" and "entertaining" arguments are once again personal opinons. However, looking through Jmark's other reviews, I can see that he is mostly into relatively modern stuff. I think we can easily take his opinion about Shakespeare with a grain of salt, given his comments about "what was entertaining even twenty years ago" and "last year's fashions"; old = bad, new = good (except when what is new gets to be twenty years old and then it = bad as well).
And finally, I would love to see Shakespeare "freed from the support of the educational system," just so I could watch him still be considered one of the most vibrant authors (yes, my opinion, just as Jmark believes just the opposite). And I'll leave out Shakespeare's influence on more modern authors.
I've probably spent way too much time responding to this post. I will not be doing a follow-up, even if Jmark responds. My intent in responding was to defend my beloved Shakespeare whom I discovered several years before I even reached high school and so my admiration of him has nothing to do with what the academics think.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Tales of the bard
Comment: Shakespeare requires no introduction -- he is "the Bard," the most imposing playwright and storyteller in the English language. And "William Shakespeare: The Complete Works" brings together every one of his 39 plays, ranging from harrowing tragedies to airy little puffs of comedy -- and even the lesser plays are still brilliant.
The plays basically are divided into comedies, histories and tragedies. The tragedies are pretty much... tragic, the comedies are not always funny but end semi-happily, and the histories... well, dramatizations of history.
And everybody has heard of the greats here -- the Scottish lord who murders his way to kingship, young lovers divided by a feud, a Moorish general who is driven mad with jealousy, an elderly king whose arrogance rips his life apart, a very cleaned-up version of Henry VIII's split from his first wife, the goofy Prince Hal and his growth into a great king. There are feuding fairies, bickering lovers, romantic tangles, Julius Caesar's demise, gender-bending, an exiled duke/magician on his island, and the infamous "pound of flesh" bargain.
But Shakespeare also wrote a bunch of lesser-known plays that often can't be so neatly categorized -- a rotten love affair during the siege of Troy, a Roman general attacking his own city, an Athenian gentleman embittered by humanity, Richard III's Machiavellian plot to become king, two sets of twins separated at birth, a corrupt judge obsessed with a lovely nun, Falstaff's doomed efforts to make money, and so on. Some of these ("Troilus and Cressida") aren't nearly as good as his "main" body of work, but they're still excellent.
For all Shakespeare's plays, it's best to read them AFTER you've seen a good performance. Otherwise, it's like reading a movie script to a movie you haven't seen -- easy to get lost, and the dramatic effects aren't easy to connect to. But if you've seen performances of any/all of Shakespeare's plays, then his vibrant stories and poetry leap off the page.
There are long eloquent speeches, puns, clever linguistic twists, and evocative language that soaks the play in atmosphere ("With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine/There sleeps Titania sometime of the night/Lull'd in these flowers with dances and delight..."). In fact, his plays are diamond mines of quotations -- some are infamous ("To be or not to be") and some of which have floated into public knowledge without labels ("Cowards die many times before their deaths/The valiant never taste of death but once").
And while some of his plays are basically fluff, he manages to weave in moral questions, criticism and explorations of the human soul. And his characters range as far as his plots -- kings and princes, teenage lovers, proud but doomed men, bratty queens, the witty but combative Beatrice and Benedick, and even the puppet-master mage Prospero.
Shakespeare's "Complete Works" is a must-have for anyone who loves the English language -- his writing was unparalleled, and even his lesser plays are a cut above the rest.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: A good and cheap collection.
Comment: The way that long lines end is a little confusing at first, and makes reading with a group somewhat awkward, but for the price this is a great book.
Customer Rating:
Summary: do not use
Comment: I ordered a book, received it a few days after the last day of estimated arrival, and then it was the wrong book.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A Rose By Any Other Name
Comment: What can I say about the Bard that hasn't already been said? Nice haircut? The book was in good coindition and I got a great price. Great reading Ol' Willy. You should try it some time. BU then, you'd have to put down the remore, and the Wii wand.
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