Publisher's Synopsis
The most comprehensive edition of Antony and Cleopatra ever produced, this New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare is a guide to everything of significance now known about the tragedy. The product of decades of work, the volume is divided into four main parts:
- the text of the play, reprinted from the First Folio edition of 1623
- textual notes indicating departures from the First Folio text in fifty-two other editions of the play
- explanatory notes summarising the textual critiques of a long succession of editors and scholars
- an appendix that includes essays on the play's date of composition, sources and influences, textual evolution, critical heritage, and stage history
The volume also reproduces seven major source texts: Plutarch's Life of Marcus Antonius and Comparison of Demetrius with Antonius, Goulart's Life of Octavius Caesar Augustus, Appian's Romanes Warres, Pembroke's Antonius, and Daniel's Tragedie of Cleopatra and Letter from Octavia to Marcus Antonius. A bibliography and an index conclude the work.
Replacing the Variorum Edition of 1907, this volume is indispensable for all academic libraries and for students and scholars of Shakespeare.
